164 Science Quotes from Famous Scientists about Life and Death

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Science impacts many aspects of our lives.

Simply put, without it, we wouldn’t be enjoying many of the things that make our modern world possible. 

Tell us your favorite science quote in the comment section below.

What are the benefits of reading these science quotes?

From the houses we live in, the food we eat, and the cars that we drive, we experience the wonders of science every day.

This includes our favorite electronic gadgets!

Science and the technologies it has spawned to make our lives easier.

Reading through these science quotes will:

• give you a new perspective on life and death
• help you be a better student and learner
• stress the importance of those who teach us about science
• encourage you to be grateful for the advanced technology we have in our lives

Throughout history, the world has produced great scientific minds who have had an invaluable influence on society.

Driven by constant curiosity and motivation to find the truth, these men and women can be a great source of inspiration.

The science quotes below cover many areas, including scientific findings, philosophy, and the world.

Whether you’re eager to learn more about the world or you’re motivated towards betterment, we have all the inspiration you need. 

From Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein, you’ll find drops of wisdom from some of the most brilliant scientific minds the world has ever witnessed.

Enjoy these enlightening science quotes from some of the best scientists in the history of mankind.

Remember to also check our list of smart logic quotes to boost your brainpower.

Check out our most popular quote article, a list of short inspirational quotes for daily inspiration. 

Our inspirational quotes category page has all of our motivational quotes for all the different areas of life.

Science quotes from famous scientists about life and death

1. “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” – Carl Sagan

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2. “Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.” – William Blake

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3. “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” – Thomas Berger

4. “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” ― Albert Einstein

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5. “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” – Immanuel Kant

6. “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ― Isaac Asimov

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7. “Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking

8. “Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.” –  Oscar Wilde

9. “It is strange that only extraordinary men make the discoveries, which later appear so easy and simple.” – Georg C. Lichtenberg

10. “Progress is made by trial and failure; the failures are generally a hundred times more numerous than the successes; yet they are usually left unchronicled.” – WILLIAM RAMSAY

Science quotes for students

11. “The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.” – Edward Teller

12. “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” – Wernher von Braun

13. “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton

14. “Actually, everything that can be known has a Number; for it is impossible to grasp anything with the mind or to recognize it without this.” – PHILOLAUS

15. “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”- Galileo Galilei

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16. “Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done.” – Robert A. Heinlein

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17. The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”– Neil deGrasse Tyson

18. “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”― Marie Curie

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19. “By ‘life,’ we mean a thing that can nourish itself and grow and decay.”
– Aristotle

20. “Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not fully understand the process of digestion?” – Oliver Heaviside

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Enlightening Science quotes

21. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” ― Isaac Newton

22. “Science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we might think.” – JACOB BRONOWSKI

23. “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” ― Richard P. Feynman

24. “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: If there is any reaction, both are transformed.” — C.G. Jung

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25. “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.” ― Carl Sagan

26. “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” – Albert Einstein

27. Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.” – Thomas Hobbes

28. “There are three stages in scientific discovery. First, people deny that it is true, then they deny that it is important; finally, they credit the wrong person.” ― Bill Bryson

29. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” – John Dewey

30. “We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.” ― Bertrand Russell

Science quotes for teachers

31. “Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. “Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.” ― Dan Brown

33. “Aerodynamically the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.”- Mary Kay Ash

34. “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.” – Galileo

35. “I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.” – Albert Einstein

36. “Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.” – Carl Sagan

37. An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.” – MAX PLANCK

38. “Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” – Edwin Powell Hubble

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39. “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he’s one who asks the right questions.” ― Claude Levi-Strauss

40. “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.” ― Victor Stenger

Science quotes that will expand your mind

41. “Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.” – A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

42. “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” ― Albert Einstein

43. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.” — Henri Poincare

44. “There is no law except the law that there is no law.” – John Archibald Wheeler

45. “Rockets are cool. There’s no getting around that.”- Elon Musk

46. “Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.” ― Stephen Hawking

47. “Science is vastly more stimulating to the imagination than the classics.” – J. B. S. HALDANE

48. “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.” — Albert Einstein

49. “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” ― Thomas A. Edison

50. “In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.” – Thomas Huxley

Other fascinating quotes about science

51. “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” – Isaac Newton

52. “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” – Arthur C. Clarke

53. “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.” – Richard Dawkins

54. “Mathematics reveals its secrets only to those who approach it with pure love, for its own beauty.” – Archimedes

55. “There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.” – Hippocrates

56. “What I love about science is that as you learn, you don’t really get answers. You just get better questions.” – John Green

57. “All sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, the mother of all Knowledge.” – Leonardo da Vinci

58. “Science is magic that works.” – Kurt Vonnegut

59. “The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.” – Erwin Schrödinger

60. “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” – Jules Verne

61. “There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.” – Isaac Asimov

62. “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” – Albert Einstein

63. “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” – Nikola Tesla

64. “Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.” – Donald E. Knuth

65. “Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it.” – Robert Sapolsky

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More science quotes and sayings

66. “Never memorize something that you can look up.” – Albert Einstein

67. “One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.” – Stephen Hawking

68. “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day.” – Albert Einstein

69. “The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” – Douglas Adams

70. “Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.” – Terry Pratchett

71. “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” – Stephen Hawking

72. “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr

73. “I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.” – Arthur C. Clarke

74. “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” – Terry Pratchett

75. That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” – Christopher Hitchens

Science quotes from some of the best minds like Stephen Hawking and Marie Curie

76. “Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

77. “I am among those who think that science has great beauty.” — Marie Curie

78. “Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.” — Rosalind Franklin

79. “What you learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance.” — David Eagleman

80. “Science is not only a disciple of reason but also one of romance and passion.” — Stephen Hawking

81. “Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge.” — Thomas Edison

82. “In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.” — Sir William Osler

83. “Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.” — Louis Pasteur

84. “When kids look up to great scientists the way they do musicians, actors [and sports figures], civilization will jump to the next level.” — Brian Greene

85. “A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.” — Marie Curie

Science Quotes That Will Make You Curious

86. “Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that’s where the light is. It has no other choice.” — Noam Chomsky

87. “Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of intelligence.” — Edgar Allan Poe

88. “Human science fragments everything in order to understand it, kills everything in order to examine it.” — Leo Tolstoy

89. “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” — Karl Marx

90. “Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding…” — Brian Greene

91. “The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth.” — Rachel Carson

92. “A real scientist solves problems, not wails that they are unsolvable.” — Anne McCaffrey

93. “Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know” — Bertrand Russell

94. “If you thought that science was certain? Well, that is just an error on your part.” — Richard Feynman

95. “There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.” — Richard Dawkins

Science Quotes About The Nature Of Science

96. “Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.” — Ray Bradbury

97. “Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.” — Paul Kalanithi

98. “Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.” — Bertrand Russell

99. “That’s the whole problem with science. You’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.” — Bill Watterson

100. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” — Max Planck

101. “Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.” — Richard P. Feynman

102. “Speculation and the exploration of ideas beyond what we know with certainty are what lead to progress.” — Lisa Randall

103. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” — Max Planck

104. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — T. S. Eliot

105. “Science you don’t know, looks like magic.” — Christopher Moore

Science Quotes To Elevate Your Curiosity

106. “All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation.” ― Bertrand Russell

107. “Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” ― Karl Popper

108. “I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worthwhile task of science.” ― Max Planck

109. “In comparing religious belief to science, I try to remember that science is belief also.” ― Robert Breault

110. “The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.” ― Thomas H. Huxley

111. “Science is competitive, aggressive, demanding. It is also imaginative, inspiring, uplifting.” ― Vera Rubin

112. “The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” ― Thomas Huxley

113. “The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” ― Bertolt Brecht

114. “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.” ― Albert Einstein

115. “Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.” ― Jacob Bronowski

Science Quotes To Make Predictions

116. “Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

117. “Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses.” — Martin Gardner

118. “The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.” — H. L. Mencken

119. “In every department of physical science there is only so much science, properly so-called, as there is mathematics.” — Immanuel Kant

120. “Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines.” — Bertrand Russell

121. “Sciences may be learned by rote, but wisdom not.” — Laurence Sterne

122. “Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.” — Alan Turing

123. “Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.” — James D. Watson

124. “Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.” — William James

125. “Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in.” — Stephen Hawking

Science Quotes To Change Your Perception

126. “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” ― Carl Sagan

127. “Science is fun. Science is curiosity. We all have natural curiosity. Science is a process of investigating. It’s posing questions and coming up with a method. It’s delving in.” — Sally Ride

128. “Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” — Leonardo da Vinci

129. “In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” — Paul Dirac

130. “Science is a perception of the world around us. Science is a place where what you find in nature pleases you.” — Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

131. “The real and legitimate goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new commodities.” — Francis Bacon

132. [Science is] a great game. It is inspiring and refreshing. The playing field is the universe itself.” — Isidor Isaac Rabi

133.  “Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.” — Bertrand Russell

134. “Science, for me, gives a partial explanation for life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.” — Rosalind Franklin

135. “Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions.” — Vera Rubin

Science Quotes on the Marvels of the Natural World

136. “The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.” ― Walter Gilbert

137. “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” ― Richard P. Feynman

138. “The chief end of science is to make things clear, the educative aim is to foster the inquisitive spirit.” ― J. Arthur Thomson

139. “Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.” ― Pope John Paul II

140. “I believe there are no questions that science can’t answer about a physical universe.” ― Stephen Hawking

141. “To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth.” ― Evelyn Fox Keller

142. “In essence, science is a perpetual search for an intelligent and integrated comprehension of the world we live in.” ― C. B. van Niel

143. “The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.” ― Thomas Kuhn

144. “The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.” ― Jawaharlal Nehru

145. “It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.” ― John Desmond Bernal

Science Quotes on Discovery and Innovation

146. “[Science is] the literature of truth.” ― Josh Billings

147. “There is nothing particularly scientific about excessive caution. Science thrives on daring generalizations.” ― Lancelot Hogben

148. “A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.” ― James D. Watson

149. “[Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.” ― Carl Sagan

150. “Science is the systematic classification of experience.” ― George Henry Lewes

151. “All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.” ― Albert Einstein

152. “Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.” ― Helen Keller

153. “There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.” ― Louis Pasteur

154. “Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.” ― Albert Einstein

155. “Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent.” ― Stephen Jay Gould

156. “The person who thought there could be any real conflict between science and religion must be either very young in science or ignorant of religion.” — Joseph Henry

157. “A mere index hunter, who held the eel of science by the tail.” — Tobias Smollett

158. “Taken over the centuries, scientific ideas have exerted a force on our civilization fully as great as the more tangible practical applications of scientific research.” — I. Bernard Cohen

159. “We are in the ordinary position of scientists of having to be content with piecemeal improvements: we can make several things clearer, but we cannot make anything clear.” — Frank P. Ramsey

160. “There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics. … We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.” — Voltaire

161. “Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.” — Edmund Hillary

162. “I believe in an immortal soul. Science has proved that nothing disintegrates into nothingness. Life and soul, therefore, cannot disintegrate into nothingness, and so are immortal.” — Wernher von Braun

163. “Science…is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.” — Carl Jung

164. “The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.” — Albert Einstein

Which of these science quotes was your favorite?

Overall, science impacts us every moment of our lives.

Whether it’s the electronic gadgets we seem addicted to, the food we consume, the houses we live in, or the medication we seek when ill, science forms the basis of all human activity.

Although they may not be the kind of people you would initially look to for inspiration, there’s a lot of wisdom to be gained from scientists.

So, hopefully, these quotes have enlightened you and motivated you to reach your goals.

Did you enjoy these science quotes?

Which of the quotes was your favorite?

We would love to hear all about it in the comment section below.