I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.

One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.

[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature-a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules-out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.

Nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.