"Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness." - Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables
Just as flying is an escape from gravity into the third dimension, so science is an escape from the mundane normality of the everyday, spiralling up through rarified heights of the imagination. Come, let's spread our wings and see where they may take us.
Richard Dawkins, Flights of Fancy
"No amount of experimentation can prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." -Albert Einstein
"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose." -Zora Neale Hurston
"We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." -Walt Disney
"The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see." -John Tukey
"Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination." -Vin Scully
"Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect." -Patrick Rothfuss, in The Wise Man's Fear
" ... which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?' Mr. Okamoto: 'That's an interesting question?' Mr. Chiba: 'The story with animals.' Mr. Okamoto: 'Yes. The story with animals is the better story.' Pi Patel: 'Thank you. And so it goes with God.” - Yann Martel, in Life of Pi
"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." - Mother Teresa
“If at first you don’t succeed— You’ll never get funded again.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future
"I said that if science could come up with something like the jump it could surely solve a problem like that. Severin seized hold of that word, "science." Science, he said, is not some mysterious larger-than-life force, it's just the name we give to the bright ideas that individual guys have when they're lying in bed at night. . ." - Michael Faber, in The Book of Strange New Things
"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't." -Bill Nye
"Fitting is easy; Prediction is hard." -Richard McElreath
"There are two kinds of people in the world. The kind that go to others for help, and the kind that others come to for help." -Travis Thompson
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." -Mark Twain
"The favorable opportunity must be seized, for fortune is female- if you baulk her today, you must not expect to meet with her again tomorrow." -Napoleon Bonaparte
"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope'" - Alexandre Dumas, in Count of Monte Cristo
"I am a human, I consider nothing that is human alien to me" -Terence
“Everyone knows me but no one can tell me. No one knows me even though everyone has heard my name. Everyone talking together makes something like me but is not me. Everyone doing things in the world makes me. I am blood in the streets, the catastrophe you can never forget. I am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. I happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. I do not exist and yet I am everything.
You know what I am. I am History. Now make me good.”
-Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future