Experimenters are the shock troops of science.

I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it.

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.

A man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong.

Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.

The book of nature which we have to read is written by the finger of God.

But still try, for who knows what is possible?

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.

The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.

The pioneer scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."

What seems today inconceivable will appear one day, from a higher stand point, quite simple and harmonious.

Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.

The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.

A new truth always has to conend with many difficulties. If it were not so, it would have been discovered much sooner.

No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.