Discoverer Quotes
Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it.
Henry Jacob Bigelow
I think that the cultivation of the humane letters has the most distinct bearing on the cultivation and appreciation of science. Science is nothing without imagination; and imagination is most readily kept fresh by literature. What little good there is a mere descriptive person, and in the small facts which with painful toil he accumulates. But let these facts be welded together by thought, their bearing traced by imagination, experiments devised by the mind projecting itself in advance of them, and the plodder is likely to become the great discoverer.
Jacob Mendes Da Costa
It is a curious fact, that the true has always been more opposed at the outset than the false; the circulation of the blood and vaccination nearly lost their discoverers credit and practice, while some vender of quack medicines makes a rapid fortune. This may perhaps be accounted for, simply, that the impostor addresses the multitude, while the scientific discoverer appeals to his brethren in knowledge, all of whom are inclined to deny, what, if admitted, must show, that a great part of their own research and acquirement has been in vain; still he who trades on human credulity will have a good stock on hand, especially when the lure held forth is that of gain.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.
Jacob Bronowski
The Illustrated Review... to which we are indebted for the preceding statements, remarks that, since the death of Sir John Herschel... Sir George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, is the admitted master of the sublime science. There are other eminent English astronomers-as John Hinde, the discoverer of many asteroids, and John Adams, also a Cambridge Senior Wrangler and the rival of Urban Leverrier, who groped his way by mathematical calculation to the discovery of the hitherto unknown planet Neptune. If incidents as brilliant and remarkable as these are wanting in the history of Sir George Airy, his claims to respect are equally valuable, solid, and enduring.
George Biddell Airy
The objects of instruction in purely scientific mechanics and physics are, first, to produce in the student that improvement of the understanding which results from the cultivation of natural knowledge, and that elevation of mind which flows from the contemplation of the order of the universe; and secondly, if possible, to qualify him to become a scientific discoverer.
William John Macquorn Rankine