Experiment Quotes

“The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it”
― D.L. Moody

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“Life is an experiment in which you may fail or succeed. Explore more, expect least.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“It's much easier on the emotions when one sees life as an experiment rather than a struggle for popularity.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Dancer and Waif sprinted toward the edge. Picking up speed. Bad Ass on his one real leg doing a great job of keeping up. Kind of.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion from Eden.) In The Garden, God tells Eve and Adam that He has intentionally left the Universe unfinished. It is the responsibility of humans, over countless generations, to participate with God in a "glorious" experiment - the "completing of the Creation."
The burden of such a responsibility is heavy, especially on so weak and imperfect a species as ours, one with so unhappy a history. Nothing remotely like "completion" can be attempted without vastly more knowledge than we have today. But, perhaps, if our very existence is at stake, we will find ourselves able to rise to this supreme challenge.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.”
― Galileo Galilei , Discorsi E Dimostrazioni Matematiche: Intorno a Due Nuoue Scienze, Attenenti Alla Mecanica & I Movimenti Locali

“I was reading about animals a while back and there was this motherfucking scientist in France back in the thirties or forties or whenever the motherfuck it was and he was trying to get apes to draw these pictures, to make art pictures like the kinds of pictures in serious motherfucking paintings that you see in museums and shit. So the scientist keeps showing the apes these paintings and giving them charcoal pencils to draw with and then one day one of the apes finally draws something but it’s not the art pictures that it draws. What it draws is the bars of its own motherfucking cage. Its own motherfucking cage! Man, that's the truth, ain't it?”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.”
― Stanley Milgram

“Not only are there meaningless questions, but many of the problems with which the human intellect has tortured itself turn out to be only 'pseudo problems,' because they can be formulated only in terms of questions which are meaningless. Many of the traditional problems of philosophy, of religion, or of ethics, are of this character. Consider, for example, the problem of the freedom of the will. You maintain that you are free to take either the right- or the left-hand fork in the road. I defy you to set up a single objective criterion by which you can prove after you have made the turn that you might have made the other. The problem has no meaning in the sphere of objective activity; it only relates to my personal subjective feelings while making the decision.”
― Percy Williams Bridgman, The Nature of Physical Theory

“Thus, by science I mean, first of all, a worldview giving primacy to reason and observation and a methodology aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of the natural and social world. This methodology is characterized, above all else, by the critical spirit: namely, the commitment to the incessant testing of assertions through observations and/or experiments — the more stringent the tests, the better — and to revising or discarding those theories that fail the test. One corollary of the critical spirit is fallibilism: namely, the understanding that all our empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete and open to revision in the light of new evidence or cogent new arguments (though, of course, the most well-established aspects of scientific knowledge are unlikely to be discarded entirely).

. . . I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical methods analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. (Please note the limitation to questions of fact. I intentionally exclude from my purview questions of ethics, aesthetics, ultimate purpose, and so forth.) Thus, 'science' (as I use the term) is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers and indeed all human beings in (some aspects of) our daily lives. (Of course, the fact that we all practice science from time to time does not mean that we all practice it equally well, or that we practice it equally well in all areas of our lives.)”
― Alan Sokal

“Our lives are led, and our decisions made, within a network of needs and wants, some natural, some arising from the acts of others, some aggravated by the acts of the state. We are all bored, or threatened, or tantalized in differing degrees by a perilous world, some hostile people, and a not very sensitive government.”
― Carl Cohen

“The logic of the symbol does not express the experiment; it is the experiment. Language is the phenomenon, and the observation of the phenomenon changes its nature.”
― Carlos Fuentes, Christopher Unborn

“If there was one overriding element to Faraday's character, it was humility. His 'conviction of deficiency,' as he called it, stemmed in part from his deep religiosity and affected practically every facet of his life. Thus Faraday approached both his science and his everyday conduct unhampered by ego, envy, or negative emotion. In his work, he assumed the inevitability of error and failure; whenever possible, he harnessed these as guides toward further investigation. Faraday adhered to no particular school of scientific thought. Nor did he flinch when a favored hypothesis fell to the rigors of experiment.”
― Alan Hirshfeld, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday

“Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Science is not about making predictions or performing experiments. Science is about explaining.”
― Bill Gaede

“From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley, Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The

“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is ... If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”
― Richard Feynman

“Bryson DeChambeau uses science in the true sense of the word to improve his golf game. He experiments and analyzes data to get better, and this separates golf fans, because those who think that's not cool use all of their brain capacity just breathing, like amoebas, but dumber.”
― Jarod Kintz, To be good at golf you must go full koala bear

“Like most arts, the link between the mind and the pen can chain you like an enslaved workaholic. Even on an intended vacation you suddenly have this killer urge to record whatever the vacation may teach.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.”
― Kate Braverman, Small Craft Warnings: Stories

“The attempt of Lavoisier to reform chemical nomenclature is premature. One single experiment may destroy the whole filiation of his terms; and his string of sulphates, sulphites, and sulphures, may have served no end than to have retarded the progress of science by a jargon, from the confusion of which time will be requisite to extricate us.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“I am a walking chemistry experiment.”
― Steven Magee

“Life is a mixture of e.g. – "E"xperiments which one attempts voluntarily to escape from status quo for better; "G"ames where one strategizes cooperatively or competitively.”
― Fendi Tsim

“To fully integrate new ideas into our lives, we need to experiment with them, and through trial and error, explore how they might work for our unique circumstances.”
― Laurie E. Smith, Leap With Me: A Creative Path to Finding and Following Your True Voice

“We each need the dignity and freedom to be able to test new ideas and finetune them to see how they might best work for us.”
― Laurie E. Smith, Leap With Me: A Creative Path to Finding and Following Your True Voice

“In its stable state air is invisible, but when it is moved and condensed it becomes first wind and then cloud and then water, and finally water condensed becomes mud and stone. Rarefied air became fire, thus completing the gamut of the elements. In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air. In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment — an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself. Blow on your hand, First with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the First time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot. This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature.”
― Anthony Kenny, Ancient Philosophy

“Preston could throw that blanket over a toy she was crawling after and Cordie would sit up and howl with despair at its sudden disappearance. She didn't know to look under the blanket, and Preston couldn't resist repeating the experiment, amazed at his sister's conviction that unseen things did not exist. Some time between then and now, Cordie had conquered the biggest truth in the world.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior