Scientists, Inventors, Physicians

No aptitude at all for long division, but never mind. It's him they ask to split the atom. How he talked his way into the Nobel prize is beyond me. But then, I suppose it's like the man says, 'It's not what you know...'
Karl Arbeiter, Former teacher of Albert Einstein

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!", but "That's funny..."
Isaac Asimov

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell

The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.
Joan Borysenko

May this continent, the last explored by humankind, be the first one to be spared by humankind.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, 1973, on Antartica

It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney (1901-1966)

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
Thomas Alva Edison

When women hold off from marrying men, we call it independence. When men hold off from marrying women, we call it fear of commitment.
Warren Farrell (American Psychologist)

Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.
Henry Ford (1863-1947)

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
Henry Ford (1863-1947)

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.
Henry Ford (1863-1947)

The great question - which I have not been able to answer - is, "What does a woman want?"
Sigmund Freud

Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
Erich Fromm

640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates (Born 1955), Microsoft Founder, in 1981

My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it as it is and why it exists at all.
Stephen Hawking

Man should not destroy what it cannot create.
Dr. Ruth Kiew

The world began without man, and it will complete itself without him.
Claude Levi-Strauss (French anthropologist)

Let go of your attachment to being right, and suddenly your mind is more open. You're able to benefit from the unique viewpoints of others, without being crippled by your own judgment.
Ralph Marston (Australian biochemist)

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.
Margaret Mead

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
John Muir (one of the first modern preservationists and the founder of The Sierra Club)

Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes - all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.
John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913)

I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, 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

Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible.
Simon Newcomb, 1902, eighteen months before Kitty Hawk (Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician)

I am become death, shatterer of worlds.
Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967), citing from the Bhagavadgita, after witnessing the world's first nuclear explosion

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970, philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, and pacifist)

There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats.
Albert Schweitzer (Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician)

A ship in harbor is safe - but that is not what ships are built for.
John A. Shedd (second president and chairman of the board of Marshall Field & Company)

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.
Thomas Szasz (psychiatrist and academic)

To love and to be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.
David Viscott (American psychiatrist, author, businessman, and media personality)