"William James used to preach the 'will to believe'; for my part, I should wish to preach the 'will to doubt'... What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite." -Bertrand Russell
"The ways in which man came into the knowledge of things celestial appears to me almost as marvelous as the nature of those things themselves." -Johannes Kepler
"If life has no meaning, Man will invent one." - Voltaire
"Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein
"The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination." Bertrand Russell
"No generalization is worth a damn, including this one." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Facts are sacred (and passive), opinions are free (and active)" - G.K. Chesterton
"We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction between the science of mental relations in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repititions." - G.K. Chesterton
"Whether or not nature behaves according to law depends entirely upon whether we succeed in writing laws that describe its behaviour" - Goodman
"(There is a) fundamental contrast between deductive logic, true of all possible worlds, and inductive logic, capable only of telling us how we may reasonably expect this world to behave." - Martin Gardner
"Science never professes to present more than a working diagram of fact. She does not explain; she states the relations and associations of facts as simply as possible." - H.G. Wells
"In science, 'fact' merely means 'verified to such an extent that it would be perverse to withhold provisional ascent.' Of course, apples may start rising tomorrow but such a possibility doesn't merit equal time in physics classrooms." Stephen J. Gould
"The provisional nature of our conclusions must be clearly recognized; they should all be prefaced wih the words 'in the present state of our knowledge, it appears that....'" - Verhoogen et al.
"Researchers have already cast much darkness on the subject, and if they continue thier investigations, we shall know nothing at all about it." - Mark Twain.
As the circle of light (scientific knowledge) increases, the circumference of darkness (the unknown) also increases. (paraphrased) - Albert Einstein
"Theories are nets: only he who casts will catch." - Novalis
"It is not given to science to reach either truth or falsity...but scientific statements can only attain continuous degrees of probability whose unattainable upper and lower limits are truth and falsity." - Reichenbach
" ...(in the real world) universal statements are never derivable from singular statements but can be contradicted by singular statements." - Karl Popper
"Whenever we try to propose a solution to a problem, we might try as hard as we can to overthrow our solution, rather than defend it. Few of us, unfortunately, practice this precept; but other people, fortunately, will supply the criticism for us if we fail to supply it ourselves." - Karl Popper
"Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great open spaces have a splendor of their own." - Bertrand Russell
"Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism; the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance and are best corrected by a little astronomy." - Bertrand Russell
"Nothing worth knowing can be understood." - Woody Allen