Vladimir Nabokov Quotes

And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.

Only when I began studying chemical engineering at Oregon Agricultural College did I realize that I myself might discover something new about the nature of the world.

When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don't turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist.

Knowing how contented, free, and joyful is life in the world of science, one fervently wishes that many would enter its portals.

What scientist would not long to go on living, if only to see how the little truths he has brought to light will grow up?

Science is the poetry of reality.

Experimentalists never know when their work is finished.

One (practitioner of science) is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ.

Science is the topography of ignorance.

In matters of science, curiosity gratified begets not indolence, but new desires.

Science is the key which unlocks the storehouses of nature.

When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There's something that might be called the 'graduate student syndrome'; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.

It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.

Science demands patience.

One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. But experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

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.

Without science, there would be no such hope.

For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

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.

Science's job is to map our ignorance.

We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge

It can be said with complete confidence that any scientist of any age who wants to make important discoveries must study important problems. Dull or piffling problems yield dull or piffling answers. It is not enough that a problem should be "interesting".