When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.
The steam engine has done much more for science than science has done for the steam engine.
Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results.
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
Science is bound, by the everlasting vow of honour, to face fearlessly every problem which can be fairly presented to it.
The true measure of a man is what he would do if he knew he would never be caught.
The atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words.
The more thoroughly I conduct scientific research, the more I believe that science excludes atheism.
