Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.

We are all shot through with enough motives to make a massacre, any day of the week that we want to give them their head.

The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay...

The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.