Edmund Burke Quotes

An open mind is not an end in itself but a means to the end of finding truth.

If one has curiosity, then one stands the chance of attain a high level of scientific inquiry.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.

All human progress is preceded by new questions

...to many it is not knowledge but the quest for knowledge that gives greater interest to thought-to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.

Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.

The search for the lessons of the new science is still in progress, really in its infancy. In this realm, three is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. Curiosity, not certainty, becomes the saving grace.

Man's greatest asset is the unsettled mind.

If a man spends enough time in a library, he may actually change his mind. I have seen it happen.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it.

As my father [Javāharlāl Nehrū] said, you have to keep an open mind, but you have to pour something into it - otherwise ideas slip away like sand between your fingers.

Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don't know, not a weakness to avoid.

This attitude of mind - this attitude of uncertainty - is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire. It becomes a habit of thought. Once acquired, we cannot retreat from it anymore.

To be a scientist you have to be willing to live with uncertainty for a long time. Research scientists begin with a question and they take a decade or two to find an answer. Then the answer they get may not even answer the question they thought it would. You have to have a supple enough mind to be open to the possibility that the answer sometimes precedes the question itself.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.

A questioning mind is the most cherished resource man has and the rarest.

As with stomachs, we should pity minds that do not eat.

The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.

Ignorance is the mother of research.

There is no harm in doubt and skepticism, for it is through these that new discoveries are made.

Scientific inquiry shouldn't stop just because a reasonable explanation has apparently been found.