TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “A people without children would face a hopeless future; a country without trees is almost as helpless.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index S > William Shakespeare Quotes

Thumbnail of William Shakespeare (source)
William Shakespeare
(baptised 26 Apr 1564 - 23 Apr 1616)

English dramatist and poet who remains the world's most-performed playwright. His surviving works include 38 plays and 154 sonnets. Among his poems, he wrote two long narrative poems.

Science Quotes by William Shakespeare (78 quotes)

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (source)
“True is it, my incorporate friends,” quoth he, “That I receive the general food at first, Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the storehouse and the shop Of the whole body. But, if you do remember, I send it through the rivers of your blood, Even to the court, the heart, to th’ seat o’ th’ brain; And, through the cranks and offices of man, The strongest nerves and small inferior veins From me receive that natural competency Whereby they live. And though that all at once”— You, good friends, this says the belly, mark me.
— William Shakespeare
[Told as a fable, this is the belly’s answer to a complaint from the other members of the body that it received all the food but did no work.] In Coriolanus (1623), Act 1, Scene 1, line 130-141. Webmaster’s note: The Fable of the Belly has its roots in antiquity. William Harvey delivered a lecture in Apr 1616 on his discovery the circulation of blood in the body, but did not publish until 1628.
Science quotes on:  |  Belly (4)  |  Blood (144)  |  Body (557)  |  Brain (281)  |  Circulation (27)  |  Court (35)  |  Crank (18)  |  Do (1905)  |  First (1302)  |  Fit (139)  |  Food (213)  |  Friend (180)  |  General (521)  |  Good (906)  |  Heart (243)  |  Incorporate (9)  |  Inferior (37)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Man (2252)  |  Natural (810)  |  Nerve (82)  |  Nutrition (25)  |  Office (71)  |  Physiology (101)  |  Receive (117)  |  Remember (189)  |  River (140)  |  Say (989)  |  Shop (11)  |  Small (489)  |  Stomach (40)  |  Store (49)  |  Storehouse (6)  |  Strongest (38)  |  Through (846)  |  Vein (27)  |  Whole (756)

[We] do not learn for want of time,
The sciences that should become our country.
— William Shakespeare
In Henry V (1599), Act 5, Scene 2, line 59-60.
Science quotes on:  |  Become (821)  |  Country (269)  |  Do (1905)  |  Learn (672)  |  Science And Politics (16)  |  Time (1911)  |  Want (504)

Prospero: Hast thou, spirit,
Performed, to point, the tempest that I bade thee?
Ariel: To every article.
I boarded the king’s ship. Now on the beak,
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flamed amazement.
Sometime I’d divide
And burn in many places; on the topmast,
The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly,
Then meet and join. Jove’s lightnings, the precursors
O’ th’ dreadful thunderclaps, more momentary
And sight-outrunning were not. The fire and cracks
Of sulphurous roaring the most mighty Neptune
Seem to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble;
Yea, his dread trident shake.
— William Shakespeare
In The Tempest (1611), Act 1, Scene 2, line 193-206.
Science quotes on:  |  Amazement (19)  |  Bold (22)  |  Burn (99)  |  Divide (77)  |  Dreadful (16)  |  Fire (203)  |  Flame (44)  |  Lightning (49)  |  Meteorology (36)  |  More (2558)  |  Most (1728)  |  Neptune (13)  |  Perform (123)  |  Point (584)  |  Precursor (5)  |  Shake (43)  |  Ship (69)  |  Sight (135)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Sulphur (19)  |  Tempest (7)  |  Thunder (21)  |  Wave (112)

Third Fisherman: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.
First Fisherman: Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful: such whales have I heard on o’ the land, who never leave gaping till they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.
— William Shakespeare
In Pericles (1609), Act 2, Scene 1, line 29-38.
Science quotes on:  |  Bell (35)  |  Church (64)  |  Compare (76)  |  Devour (29)  |  Do (1905)  |  Driving (28)  |  Eat (108)  |  First (1302)  |  Fish (130)  |  Fisherman (9)  |  Great (1610)  |  Last (425)  |  Little (717)  |  Live (650)  |  Marine Biology (24)  |  Marvel (37)  |  Master (182)  |  Never (1089)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Poor (139)  |  Sea (326)  |  Steeple (4)  |  Swallow (32)  |  Whale (45)  |  Whole (756)  |  Why (491)

CALPURNIA: When beggars die there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
CAESAR: Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I have yet heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
— William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar (1599), II, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Beggar (5)  |  Blaze (14)  |  Comet (65)  |  Coward (5)  |  Death (406)  |  End (603)  |  Fear (212)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Heavens (125)  |  Most (1728)  |  Necessary (370)  |  Never (1089)  |  Prince (13)  |  Seeing (143)  |  Small (489)  |  Strange (160)  |  Taste (93)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Time (1911)  |  Will (2350)  |  Wonder (251)

CLAUDIO: Death is a fearful thing.
ISABELLA: And shamed life a hateful.
CLAUDIO: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisioned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worst than worst
Of those lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisionment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
— William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure (1604), III, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Become (821)  |  Cold (115)  |  Death (406)  |  Delight (111)  |  Fear (212)  |  Flood (52)  |  Ice (58)  |  Imagine (176)  |  Know (1538)  |  Lie (370)  |  Life (1870)  |  Most (1728)  |  Motion (320)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Paradise (15)  |  Penury (3)  |  Reside (25)  |  Rot (9)  |  Rotting (2)  |  Small (489)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thought (995)  |  Violence (37)  |  Warm (74)  |  Wind (141)  |  World (1850)  |  Worst (57)

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
— William Shakespeare
Henry IV, Part I (1597), III, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Call (781)  |  Deep (241)  |  Do (1905)  |  Man (2252)  |  Small (489)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Why (491)  |  Will (2350)

LEPIDUS: What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?
ANTONY: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.
LEPIDUS: What colour is it of?
ANTONY:Of its own colour, too.
LEPIDUS:’Tis a strange serpent.
ANTONY:’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet.
— William Shakespeare
In Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7), II, vii.
Science quotes on:  |  Breadth (15)  |  Crocodile (14)  |  Element (322)  |  High (370)  |  Live (650)  |  Move (223)  |  Nourishment (26)  |  Organ (118)  |  Serpent (5)  |  Small (489)  |  Strange (160)  |  Tear (48)  |  Thing (1914)

QUEEN: Thou know’st ’tis common—all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
HAMLET: Ay, madam, it is common.
— William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1601), I, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Common (447)  |  Cycle (42)  |  Death (406)  |  Eternity (64)  |  Hamlet (10)  |  Know (1538)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Must (1525)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Pass (241)  |  Passing (76)  |  Small (489)  |  Through (846)

SIR TOBY: Does not our lives consist of the four elements?
SIR ANDREW: Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
SIR TOBY: Thou'rt a scholar; let us therefore eat and drink.
— William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night (1601), II, iii.
Science quotes on:  |  Consist (223)  |  Drink (56)  |  Drinking (21)  |  Eat (108)  |  Eating (46)  |  Element (322)  |  Faith (209)  |  Life (1870)  |  Live (650)  |  Say (989)  |  Scholar (52)  |  Small (489)  |  Think (1122)

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor?
Doctor: Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies,
That keep her from her rest.
Macbeth: Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
Macbeth: Throw physic to the dogs; I'll none of it.
— William Shakespeare
Macbeth (1606), V, iii.
Science quotes on:  |  Antidote (9)  |  Bosom (14)  |  Brain (281)  |  Cleanse (5)  |  Coming (114)  |  Cure (124)  |  Disease (340)  |  Doctor (191)  |  Dog (70)  |  Heart (243)  |  Himself (461)  |  Lord (97)  |  Memory (144)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Minister (10)  |  Must (1525)  |  Oblivious (9)  |  Patient (209)  |  Peril (9)  |  Physic (515)  |  Pluck (5)  |  Psychiatry (26)  |  Rest (287)  |  Root (121)  |  Sick (83)  |  Small (489)  |  Sorrow (21)  |  Sweet (40)  |  Trouble (117)  |  Variant (9)  |  Weigh (51)  |  Writing (192)

And nature must obey necessity.
— William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar (1599), IV, iii.
Science quotes on:  |  Must (1525)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Necessity (197)  |  Obedience (20)  |  Obey (46)

And teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night …
— William Shakespeare
The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2. In Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1986), 188.
Science quotes on:  |  Burn (99)  |  Day (43)  |  Light (635)  |  Moon (252)  |  Name (359)  |  Night (133)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Sun (407)  |  Teach (299)

As true as steel, as plantage to the moon,
As sun to day, at turtle to her mate,
As iron to adamant, as earth to centre.
— William Shakespeare
Character Troilus speaking to Cressida, in play Troilus and Cressida (c.1601), Act 3, lines 352-354. In Troilus and Cressida (1811), 72.
Science quotes on:  |  Adamant (3)  |  Centre (31)  |  Day (43)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Gravity (140)  |  Iron (99)  |  Law Of Gravitation (23)  |  Mate (7)  |  Moon (252)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Steel (23)  |  Sun (407)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Turtle (8)

Be not afeard.
The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.
— William Shakespeare
The Tempest (1611), III, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Delight (111)  |  Dream (222)  |  Drop (77)  |  Ear (69)  |  Humming (5)  |  Hurt (14)  |  Instrument (158)  |  Isle (6)  |  Long (778)  |  Mine (78)  |  Noise (40)  |  Open (277)  |  Riches (14)  |  Show (353)  |  Sleep (81)  |  Sound (187)  |  Sweet (40)  |  Thought (995)  |  Thousand (340)  |  Voice (54)  |  Waking (17)  |  Will (2350)

Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
— William Shakespeare
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Achieve (75)  |  Afraid (24)  |  Bear (162)  |  Great (1610)  |  Greatness (55)  |  Thrust (13)

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow,
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o'th' world,
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That makes ingrateful man.
— William Shakespeare
King Lear (1605-61, III, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Blow (45)  |  Cataract (4)  |  Cheek (3)  |  Cock (6)  |  Crack (15)  |  Drench (2)  |  Drown (14)  |  Fire (203)  |  Flat (34)  |  Head (87)  |  Hurricane (4)  |  Man (2252)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Oak (16)  |  Rage (10)  |  Singe (2)  |  Spout (2)  |  Steeple (4)  |  Strike (72)  |  Sulphur (19)  |  Thought (995)  |  Thunder (21)  |  Thunderbolt (7)  |  White (132)  |  Wind (141)  |  World (1850)

But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It speaks, and yet says nothing.
— William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Break (109)  |  Light (635)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Say (989)  |  Soft (30)  |  Speak (240)  |  Through (846)  |  Window (59)

But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to 't.
— William Shakespeare
Character Cressidus to Pandarus in play Troilus and Cressida (c.1601), Act 4, lines 200-202. In Troilus and Cressida (1811), 92.
Science quotes on:  |  Base (120)  |  Building (158)  |  Centre (31)  |  Drawing (56)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Gravity (140)  |  Law Of Gravitation (23)  |  Love (328)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Strength (139)  |  Strong (182)  |  Thing (1914)

By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death
Will seize the Doctor too.
— William Shakespeare
Cymbeline (1609, publ. 1623), Act 5, Scene 5. In Charles Knight (ed.), The Works of William Shakspere (1868), 605.
Science quotes on:  |  Death (406)  |  Doctor (191)  |  Life (1870)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Physician (284)  |  Prolong (29)  |  Will (2350)

Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home,
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor.
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o'er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
— William Shakespeare
Henry V (1599), I, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Abroad (19)  |  Act (278)  |  Arm (82)  |  Building (158)  |  Burden (30)  |  Citizen (52)  |  Civil (26)  |  Creature (242)  |  Drone (4)  |  Emperor (6)  |  Gate (33)  |  Gold (101)  |  Home (184)  |  Honey (15)  |  Justice (40)  |  King (39)  |  Kingdom (80)  |  Magistrate (2)  |  Majesty (21)  |  March (48)  |  Mason (2)  |  Mechanic (120)  |  Merchant (7)  |  Narrow (85)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Officer (12)  |  Order (638)  |  Other (2233)  |  Poor (139)  |  Porter (2)  |  Roof (14)  |  Royal (56)  |  Rule (307)  |  Singing (19)  |  Soldier (28)  |  Sting (3)  |  Summer (56)  |  Survey (36)  |  Teach (299)  |  Teaching (190)  |  Tent (13)  |  Velvet (4)

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions: oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb; which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldam earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers.
— William Shakespeare
Dialogue by Hotspur to Glendower, in King Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), Act III, Scene 1. Reprinted in The Works of Shakespeare: The First Part of King Henry IV (1790), 47.
Science quotes on:  |  Break (109)  |  Colic (3)  |  Disease (340)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Earthquake (37)  |  Enlargement (8)  |  Eruption (10)  |  Forth (14)  |  Imprison (11)  |  Kind (564)  |  Moss (14)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Often (109)  |  Old (499)  |  Pinch (6)  |  Shake (43)  |  Steeple (4)  |  Strange (160)  |  Strive (53)  |  Teem (2)  |  Topple (2)  |  Tower (45)  |  Unruly (4)  |  Vex (10)  |  Volcano (46)  |  Wind (141)  |  Womb (25)

Experience is a jewel, and it need be so, for it is often purchased at an infinite rate.
— William Shakespeare
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Experience (494)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Jewel (10)  |  Need (320)  |  Often (109)  |  Purchase (8)  |  Rate (31)

Fat paunches have lean pates; and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.
— William Shakespeare
Spoken by character Longaville in play, Love's Labour's Lost, Act 1, Scene 1, Line 26. In Louis Klopsch, Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1896), 110.
Science quotes on:  |  Bankrupt (4)  |  Fat (11)  |  Gluttony (6)  |  Lean (7)  |  Rib (6)  |  Wit (61)

For mine own part, it was Greek to me.
— William Shakespeare
In Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2, line 287.
Science quotes on:  |  Greek (109)  |  Linguistics (39)  |  Mine (78)

For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently,
However they have writ the style of gods,
And made a push at chance and sufferance.
— William Shakespeare
Much Ado about Nothing (1598-9), V, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Chance (244)  |  Endurance (8)  |  God (776)  |  Never (1089)  |  Patience (58)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Push (66)  |  Sufferance (2)  |  Toothache (3)

For to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
— William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1601), II, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Definition (238)  |  Mad (54)  |  Madness (33)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Truth (1109)

Give me an ounce of civit, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.
— William Shakespeare
In Raymond C. Rowe, Joseph Chamberlain, A Spoonful of Sugar (2007),
Science quotes on:  |  Apothecary (10)  |  Give (208)  |  Good (906)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Ounce (9)

God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.
— William Shakespeare
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Face (214)  |  Give (208)  |  God (776)

I am ill at these numbers.
— William Shakespeare
In Hamlet (1603), Act 2, Scene 2. [Note: Not for arithmetic. The numbers relate to the number of syllables in each line to write poetry; he is a bad poet. —Webmaster]
Science quotes on:  |  Ill (12)  |  Number (710)  |  Poetry (150)

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.
— William Shakespeare
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Answer (389)  |  Bind (26)  |  Bound (120)  |  Please (68)  |  Thou (9)

I cannot do it without Compters.
— William Shakespeare
In A Winter’s Tale (1623), Act 4, Scene 3. [Note: a compter is a round piece of metal used for counting - a simple computer!]
Science quotes on:  |  Arithmetic (144)  |  Computer (131)  |  Count (107)  |  Do (1905)

I do present you with a man of mine
Cunning in music and the mathematics
To instruct her fully in those sciences.
— William Shakespeare
Referring to Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew (1594), Act 2, Scene 1, in The Plays of William Shakespeare (1813), 242.
Science quotes on:  |  Cunning (17)  |  Do (1905)  |  Instruction (101)  |  Man (2252)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Mine (78)  |  Music (133)  |  Present (630)

I’ll teach you differences.
— William Shakespeare
King Lear (1605-6), I, iv.
Science quotes on:  |  Difference (355)  |  Teach (299)  |  Teaching (190)

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.
— William Shakespeare
In Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7), I, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Book (413)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Infinity (96)  |  Little (717)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Read (308)  |  Reading (136)  |  Secret (216)

It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging, this majestic roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
— William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1601), II, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Action (342)  |  Admirable (20)  |  Air (366)  |  Angel (47)  |  Animal (651)  |  Apprehension (26)  |  Beauty (313)  |  Brave (16)  |  Canopy (8)  |  Congregation (3)  |  Delight (111)  |  Disposition (44)  |  Dust (68)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Excellence (40)  |  Express (192)  |  Faculty (76)  |  Fire (203)  |  Form (976)  |  Foul (15)  |  Frame (26)  |  God (776)  |  Golden (47)  |  Heavily (14)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Look (584)  |  Man (2252)  |  Most (1728)  |  Nobility (5)  |  Noble (93)  |  Other (2233)  |  Paragon (4)  |  Pestilence (14)  |  Promontory (3)  |  Quintessence (4)  |  Reason (766)  |  Roof (14)  |  Say (989)  |  Sterile (24)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Vapor (12)  |  Vapour (16)  |  Why (491)  |  Woman (160)  |  Work (1402)  |  World (1850)

It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.
— William Shakespeare
As You Like It (1599), III, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Atom (381)  |  Count (107)  |  Ease (40)  |  Easy (213)  |  Lover (11)  |  Proposition (126)  |  Resolution (24)  |  Resolve (43)

It is excellent
To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
— William Shakespeare
Lines for Isabelle in Measure For Measure (1604), Act 2, Scene 2, 133-135.
Science quotes on:  |  Excellence (40)  |  Giant (73)  |  Strength (139)  |  Tyranny (15)  |  Use (771)

It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.
— William Shakespeare
In Othello (1622), Act 5, Scene 2, line 109-111.
Science quotes on:  |  Earth (1076)  |  Error (339)  |  Mad (54)  |  Moon (252)  |  More (2558)  |  Nearer (45)

Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely rip’d.
— William Shakespeare
In Macbeth (1606), Act 5, scene 7, line 19-20. Collected in, for example, The Works: Of Shakespear (1726), Vol. 6, 333.
Science quotes on:  |  Mother (116)  |  Reproduction (74)  |  Womb (25)

Make not your thoughts your prisons.
— William Shakespeare
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Prison (13)  |  Thought (995)

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
— William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar Act 1, Scene 2, lines 139-141.
Science quotes on:  |  Astrology (46)  |  Fate (76)  |  Fault (58)  |  Master (182)  |  Ourselves (247)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Time (1911)

Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics—
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you.
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
— William Shakespeare
In Taming of the Shrew, Act 1, Scene 1.
Science quotes on:  |  Affect (19)  |  Brief (37)  |  Fall (243)  |  Find (1014)  |  Grow (247)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Metaphysics (53)  |  Most (1728)  |  Music (133)  |  Pleasure (191)  |  Profit (56)  |  Serve (64)  |  Stomach (40)  |  Study (701)  |  Use (771)

Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
And yet methinks I have astronomy.
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or season's quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain, and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well …
— William Shakespeare
Opening lines of 'Sonnet 14' (1609) in Complete Dramatic Works and Miscellaneous Poems (1823), 776. (1906), 14.
Science quotes on:  |  Astrology (46)  |  Astronomy (251)  |  Brief (37)  |  Do (1905)  |  Evil (122)  |  Fortune (50)  |  Good (906)  |  Judgment (140)  |  Luck (44)  |  Minute (129)  |  Plague (42)  |  Quality (139)  |  Rain (70)  |  Say (989)  |  Season (47)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Tell (344)  |  Thunder (21)  |  Wind (141)

O for the Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention…
— William Shakespeare
Henry V, Prologue. In Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1986), 262.
Science quotes on:  |  Ascend (30)  |  Brightest (12)  |  Fire (203)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Invention (400)  |  Muse (10)

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
— William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1601), II, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Bad (185)  |  Bound (120)  |  Count (107)  |  Dream (222)  |  God (776)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Infinity (96)  |  King (39)  |  Myself (211)  |  Nutshell (3)  |  Space (523)

Oh God! that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea.
— William Shakespeare
Henry V (1599), I, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Book (413)  |  Book Of Fate (2)  |  Continent (79)  |  Fate (76)  |  God (776)  |  Level (69)  |  Melting (6)  |  Mountain (202)  |  Read (308)  |  Revolution (133)  |  Sea (326)  |  See (1094)  |  Solid (119)  |  Time (1911)  |  Weary (11)

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
— William Shakespeare
Ulysses speaking to Achilles, in Troilus and Cressida, Act 3, Scene 3, line 175. John Phin and Edward Dowden clarify to the true meaning of this quote in The Shakespeare Cyclopædia and New Glossary (1902), 183, writing that in ‘an article in the Galaxy for Feb., 1877, Grant White calls attention to its true meaning, which is: “There is one point on which all men are alike, one touch of human nature which shows the kindred of all mankind—that they slight familiar merit and prefer trivial novelty. ... [It is] one of the most cynical utterances of an undisputable moral truth, disparaging to the nature of all mankind, that ever came from Shakespeare's pen.” ’
Science quotes on:  |  Kin (10)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Touch (146)  |  Whole (756)  |  Whole World (29)  |  World (1850)

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven.
— William Shakespeare
In All's Well That Ends Well, Act 1, 1, 199-200. Collected in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (1906), Vol. 1, 299.
Science quotes on:  |  Ascribe (18)  |  Do (1905)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Lie (370)  |  Often (109)  |  Ourselves (247)  |  Remedy (63)

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
— William Shakespeare
The Tempest (1611), IV, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Actor (9)  |  Air (366)  |  Behind (139)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Dissolve (22)  |  Dream (222)  |  End (603)  |  Fabric (27)  |  Fad (10)  |  Foretelling (4)  |  Great (1610)  |  Inherit (35)  |  Life (1870)  |  Little (717)  |  Melt (16)  |  Pageant (3)  |  Palace (8)  |  Rack (4)  |  Revel (6)  |  Sleep (81)  |  Solemn (20)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Temple (45)  |  Tower (45)  |  Vision (127)

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous…
— William Shakespeare
From Richard III (Nov 1633), Act 1, Scene 1. In The Plays of William Shakespeare (1804), Vol. 5, 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Dangerous (108)  |  Induction (81)  |  Plot (11)

Plutus himself,
That knows the tinct and multiplying med'cine,
Hath not in nature's mystery more science
Than I have in this ring.
— William Shakespeare
All's Well that Ends Well (1603-4), V, iii.
Science quotes on:  |  Himself (461)  |  Know (1538)  |  Medicine (392)  |  More (2558)  |  Mystery (188)  |  Nature (2017)

Report me and my cause aright.
— William Shakespeare
In Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Cause (561)  |  Report (42)  |  Right (473)

Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this.
— William Shakespeare
Sonnet 35.
Science quotes on:  |  Both (496)  |  Bud (6)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Eclipse (25)  |  Fault (58)  |  Fountain (18)  |  Live (650)  |  Loathsome (3)  |  Moon (252)  |  Mud (26)  |  Rose (36)  |  Silver (49)  |  Stain (10)  |  Sun (407)  |  Thorn (6)

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But bad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
— William Shakespeare
Sonnet 65.
Science quotes on:  |  Action (342)  |  Bad (185)  |  Beauty (313)  |  Boundless (28)  |  Brass (5)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Flower (112)  |  Power (771)  |  Sea (326)  |  Stone (168)  |  Stronger (36)

Sometimes too hot the eye of Heaven shines.
— William Shakespeare
In Sonnet 18, The Dramatic Works of Shakespeare (1824), 62.
Science quotes on:  |  Eye (440)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Hot (63)  |  Shine (49)

Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks:
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.
— William Shakespeare
Dialog for Biron, written in Love’s Labour Lost (1598), Act 1, Scene 1, line 74-77.
Science quotes on:  |  Authority (99)  |  Base (120)  |  Book (413)  |  Continual (44)  |  Deep (241)  |  Glorious (49)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Look (584)  |  Other (2233)  |  Research (753)  |  Save (126)  |  Search (175)  |  Small (489)  |  Study (701)  |  Sun (407)  |  Will (2350)  |  Win (53)

The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait.
— William Shakespeare
In Much Ado About Nothing (1600), Act 3, Scene 1, line 26
Science quotes on:  |  Angling (3)  |  Bait (2)  |  Cut (116)  |  Devour (29)  |  Fish (130)  |  Golden (47)  |  Marine Biology (24)  |  See (1094)  |  Silver (49)  |  Stream (83)

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them into shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
— William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 5, Scene 1. In Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1986), 162.
Science quotes on:  |  Earth (1076)  |  Eye (440)  |  Form (976)  |  Frenzy (6)  |  Glance (36)  |  Habitation (7)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Name (359)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Pen (21)  |  Poet (97)  |  Shape (77)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Turn (454)  |  Unknown (195)

The soul and body rive not more in parting
Than greatness going off.
— William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7), IV, xiii.
Science quotes on:  |  Body (557)  |  Greatness (55)  |  More (2558)  |  Soul (235)

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
— William Shakespeare
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.
Science quotes on:  |  Dream (222)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Heaven (266)  |  More (2558)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Thing (1914)

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
— William Shakespeare
Hamlet (1601), II, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Bad (185)  |  Good (906)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Thinking (425)

There's no art To find the mind's construction in the face.
— William Shakespeare
Macbeth (1606), I, iv.
Science quotes on:  |  Art (680)  |  Construction (114)  |  Face (214)  |  Find (1014)  |  Mind (1377)

There's nothing situate under heaven's eye
But hath his bond in earth, in sea, in sky.
The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls
Are their males' subjects and at their controls.
Man, more divine, the master of all these,
Lord of the wide world and wild wat'ry seas,
Indu'd with intellectual sense and souls,
Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls,
Are masters to their females, and their lords;
Then let your will attend on their accords.
— William Shakespeare
The Comedy of Errors (1594), II, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Attend (67)  |  Beast (58)  |  Bond (46)  |  Control (182)  |  Divine (112)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Eminence (25)  |  Eye (440)  |  Female (50)  |  Fish (130)  |  Fowl (6)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Intellect (251)  |  Intellectual (258)  |  Lord (97)  |  Male (26)  |  Man (2252)  |  Master (182)  |  More (2558)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Pre-eminence (4)  |  Sea (326)  |  Sense (785)  |  Sky (174)  |  Soul (235)  |  Subject (543)  |  Wide (97)  |  Wild (96)  |  Will (2350)  |  Wing (79)  |  World (1850)

Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound;
And through this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.
— William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595-6), II, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Abound (17)  |  Air (366)  |  Alter (64)  |  Anger (21)  |  Disease (340)  |  Distemper (5)  |  Do (1905)  |  Fall (243)  |  Flood (52)  |  Fresh (69)  |  Frost (15)  |  Lap (9)  |  Moon (252)  |  Rheumatism (3)  |  Rose (36)  |  Season (47)  |  See (1094)  |  Through (846)

These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater.
— William Shakespeare
Love's Labour's Lost (1595), IV, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Memory (144)  |  Nourishment (26)  |  Pia Mater (2)  |  Ventricle (7)  |  Womb (25)

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
— William Shakespeare
The Sonnets, (1906), 169.
Science quotes on:  |  Astronomer (97)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Light (635)  |  More (2558)  |  Name (359)  |  Profit (56)  |  Shining (35)  |  Star (460)  |  Walk (138)

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
— William Shakespeare
Dialog for Biron, written in Love’s Labour Lost (1598), Act 1, Scene 1, line 78-81.
Science quotes on:  |  Astronomical Society (2)  |  Classification (102)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Know (1538)  |  Light (635)  |  Name (359)  |  Night (133)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Profit (56)  |  Star (460)  |  Walk (138)

Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.
— William Shakespeare
Louis Klopsch, Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1896), 67.
Science quotes on:  |  Diet (56)  |  Digestion (29)  |  Prove (261)  |  Sour (3)  |  Sweet (40)  |  Taste (93)  |  Thing (1914)

This is the excellent foppery of the world: that when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows that I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
— William Shakespeare
King Lear (1605-6), I, ii.
Science quotes on:  |  Astrology (46)  |  Bastard (2)  |  Behavior (95)  |  Behaviour (42)  |  Charge (63)  |  Compound (117)  |  Compulsion (19)  |  Disaster (58)  |  Disposition (44)  |  Divine (112)  |  Dragon (6)  |  Drunkard (8)  |  Evil (122)  |  Father (113)  |  Firmament (18)  |  Follow (389)  |  Fool (121)  |  Fortune (50)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Influence (231)  |  Liar (8)  |  Major (88)  |  Man (2252)  |  Moon (252)  |  Mother (116)  |  Necessity (197)  |  Obedience (20)  |  Planet (402)  |  Planetary (29)  |  Rough (5)  |  Sick (83)  |  Star (460)  |  Stars (304)  |  Sun (407)  |  Thief (6)  |  Twinkling (2)  |  Villain (5)  |  World (1850)

This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist.
— William Shakespeare
In All’s Well That Ends Well (1623), Act 4, Scene 3, line 262.
Science quotes on:  |  Devoted (59)  |  Friend (180)  |  Linguistics (39)  |  Manifold (23)

This sceptred isle,…
This fortress built by Nature for herself…
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
— William Shakespeare
In Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1.
Science quotes on:  |  Against (332)  |  Bless (25)  |  Blessed (20)  |  Cliff (22)  |  Defence (16)  |  Earth (1076)  |  England (43)  |  Envy (15)  |  Fortress (4)  |  Geology (240)  |  House (143)  |  Invasion (9)  |  Isle (6)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Oceanography (17)  |  Office (71)  |  Precious (43)  |  Realm (87)  |  Sea (326)  |  Set (400)  |  Silver (49)  |  Stone (168)  |  Wall (71)

Thou hast nor youth nor age,
But as it were an after-dinner's sleep
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth
Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms
Of palsied eld.
— William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure (1604), III, i.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Become (821)  |  Bless (25)  |  Blessed (20)  |  Both (496)  |  Dream (222)  |  Palsy (3)  |  Sleep (81)  |  Youth (109)

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
— William Shakespeare
In Hamlet (1603), Act 2, Scene 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Madness (33)  |  Method (531)

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.
— William Shakespeare
In 'Rape of Lucrece', The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1821), Vol. 20, 159.
Science quotes on:  |  Calm (32)  |  Contend (8)  |  Falsehood (30)  |  Glory (66)  |  King (39)  |  Light (635)  |  Time (1911)  |  Truth (1109)

Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.
— William Shakespeare
From Richard III (Nov 1633), Act 1, Scene 4. In The Plays of William Shakespeare (1804), Vol. 5, 33.
Science quotes on:  |  Anchor (10)  |  Bottom (36)  |  Bottom Of The Sea (5)  |  Gold (101)  |  Great (1610)  |  Inestimable (4)  |  Jewel (10)  |  Pearl (8)  |  Scattered (5)  |  Sea (326)  |  Stone (168)  |  Value (393)  |  Wedge (3)

What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight?
— William Shakespeare
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Bed (25)  |  Gravity (140)  |  Midnight (12)

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he, “Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!” O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
— William Shakespeare
In Love’s Labour Lost (1598), Act 5, Scene 2, line 904.
Science quotes on:  |  Blue (63)  |  Botany (63)  |  Daisy (4)  |  Delight (111)  |  Do (1905)  |  Ear (69)  |  Fear (212)  |  Hue (3)  |  Meadow (21)  |  Mock (7)  |  Ornithology (21)  |  Paint (22)  |  Silver (49)  |  Tree (269)  |  Violet (11)  |  White (132)  |  Word (650)  |  Yellow (31)



Quotes by others about William Shakespeare (31)

In science, address the few; in literature, the many. In science, the few must dictate opinion to the many; in literature, the many, sooner or later, force their judgement on the few. But the few and the many are not necessarily the few and the many of the passing time: for discoverers in science have not un-often, in their own day, had the few against them; and writers the most permanently popular not unfrequently found, in their own day, a frigid reception from the many. By the few, I mean those who must ever remain the few, from whose dieta we, the multitude, take fame upon trust; by the many, I mean those who constitute the multitude in the long-run. We take the fame of a Harvey or a Newton upon trust, from the verdict of the few in successive generations; but the few could never persuade us to take poets and novelists on trust. We, the many, judge for ourselves of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners (1863), Vol. 2, 329- 30.
Science quotes on:  |  Against (332)  |  Constitute (99)  |  Discoverer (43)  |  Fame (51)  |  Force (497)  |  Generation (256)  |  William Harvey (30)  |  Judge (114)  |  Literature (116)  |  Long (778)  |  Mean (810)  |  Most (1728)  |  Multitude (50)  |  Must (1525)  |  Necessarily (137)  |  Never (1089)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Opinion (291)  |  Ourselves (247)  |  Passing (76)  |  Poet (97)  |  Reception (16)  |  Remain (355)  |  Run (158)  |  Successive (73)  |  Time (1911)  |  Trust (72)  |  Verdict (8)  |  Writer (90)

Concerning alchemy it is more difficult to discover the actual state of things, in that the historians who specialise in this field seem sometimes to be under the wrath of God themselves; for, like those who write of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy or on Spanish politics, they seem to become tinctured with the kind of lunacy they set out to describe.
The Origins of Modern Science (1949), 115.
Science quotes on:  |  Actual (118)  |  Alchemy (31)  |  Become (821)  |  Controversy (30)  |  Describe (132)  |  Difficult (263)  |  Discover (571)  |  Field (378)  |  God (776)  |  Historian (59)  |  Kind (564)  |  More (2558)  |  Politics (122)  |  Set (400)  |  State (505)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Write (250)

My Opinion is this—that deep Thinking is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind … that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakspere [sic] or a Milton… Mind in his system is always passive—a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God's Image, & that too in the sublimest sense—the image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.
Letter to Thomas Poole, 23 March 1801. In Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1956), Vol. 2, 709.
Science quotes on:  |  Creator (97)  |  Dare (55)  |  Deep (241)  |  Feeling (259)  |  God (776)  |  Ground (222)  |  Image (97)  |  Indeed (323)  |  Making (300)  |  Man (2252)  |  John Milton (31)  |  Mind (1377)  |  More (2558)  |  Must (1525)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Opinion (291)  |  Revelation (51)  |  Sense (785)  |  Soul (235)  |  Species (435)  |  Suspicion (36)  |  System (545)  |  Thinking (425)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Understand (648)  |  Work (1402)  |  World (1850)

This is, in truth, the first charm of chemistry, and the secret of the almost universal interest excited by its discoveries. The serious complacency which is afforded by the sense of truth, utility, permanence, and progression, blends with and ennobles the exhilarating surprise and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, which accompany the propounding and the solving of an Enigma... If in SHAKPEARE [sic] we find Nature idealized into Poetry, through the creative power of a profound yet observant meditation, so through the meditative observation of a DAVY, a WOOLLASTON [sic], or a HATCHETT; we find poetry, as if were, substantiated and realized in nature.
Essays on the Principle of Method, Essay VI (1818). In The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Friend (1969), Vol. 4, 1, Barbara E. Rooke (ed.), 471.
Science quotes on:  |  Accompany (22)  |  Charm (54)  |  Chemistry (376)  |  Creative (144)  |  Curiosity (138)  |  Sir Humphry Davy (49)  |  Enigma (16)  |  Find (1014)  |  First (1302)  |  Charles Hatchett (3)  |  Interest (416)  |  Meditation (19)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Observation (593)  |  Permanence (26)  |  Poetry (150)  |  Power (771)  |  Profound (105)  |  Progression (23)  |  Secret (216)  |  Sense (785)  |  Serious (98)  |  Surprise (91)  |  Through (846)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Universal (198)  |  Utility (52)  |  William Hyde Wollaston (3)

I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of his Published Letters, edited by Francis Darwin (1892), 50.
Science quotes on:  |  Biography (254)  |  Dull (58)  |  Read (308)

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive:
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne—
But the One was Me.
'Fifth Philosopher's Song', Leda (1920),33.
Science quotes on:  |  Alive (97)  |  Billion (104)  |  Cataclysm (2)  |  Dare (55)  |  John Donne (12)  |  Genetics (105)  |  Hope (321)  |  Minus One (4)  |  New (1273)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Poor (139)  |  Sperm (7)  |  Survive (87)

Even if I could be Shakespeare I think that I should still choose to be Faraday.
In 1925, attributed. Walter M. Elsasser, Memoirs of a Physicist in the Atomic Age (1978), epigraph.
Science quotes on:  |  Biography (254)  |  Choice (114)  |  Choose (116)  |  Michael Faraday (91)  |  Still (614)  |  Think (1122)

In fact a favourite problem of [Tyndall] is—Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.
Letter to Herbert Spencer (3 Aug 1861). In L. Huxley, The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (1900), Vol. 1, 249.
Science quotes on:  |  Chop (7)  |  Confident (25)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Force (497)  |  Future (467)  |  Hamlet (10)  |  Literature (116)  |  Mutton (4)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Problem (731)  |  Solve (145)  |  John Tyndall (53)  |  Will (2350)

All that comes above that surface [of the globe] lies within the province of Geography. All that comes below that surface lies inside the realm of Geology. The surface of the earth is that which, so to speak, divides them and at the same time “binds them together in indissoluble union.” We may, perhaps, put the case metaphorically. The relationships of the two are rather like that of man and wife. Geography, like a prudent woman, has followed the sage advice of Shakespeare and taken unto her “an elder than herself;” but she does not trespass on the domain of her consort, nor could she possibly maintain the respect of her children were she to flaunt before the world the assertion that she is “a woman with a past.”
From Anniversary Address to Geological Society of London (20 Feb 1903), 'The Relations of Geology', published in Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London (22 May 1903), 59, Part 2, lxxviii. As reprinted in Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (1904), 373.
Science quotes on:  |  Advice (57)  |  Children (201)  |  Divide (77)  |  Domain (72)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Elder (9)  |  Follow (389)  |  Geography (39)  |  Geology (240)  |  Lie (370)  |  Maintain (105)  |  Man (2252)  |  Metaphor (37)  |  Past (355)  |  Possibly (111)  |  Province (37)  |  Realm (87)  |  Relationship (114)  |  Respect (212)  |  Sage (25)  |  Speak (240)  |  Surface (223)  |  Surface Of The Earth (36)  |  Time (1911)  |  Together (392)  |  Trespass (5)  |  Two (936)  |  Union (52)  |  Wife (41)  |  Woman (160)  |  World (1850)

It is strongly suspected that a NEWTON or SHAKESPEARE excels other mortals only by a more ample development of the anterior cerebral lobes, by having an extra inch of brain in the right place.
Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (1819), 110.
Science quotes on:  |  Brain (281)  |  Development (441)  |  More (2558)  |  Mortal (55)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Other (2233)  |  Right (473)

Thought and science follow their own law of development; they are slowly elaborated in the growth and forward pressure of humanity, in what Shakespeare calls
...The prophetic soul,
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
St. Paul and Protestantism (1875), 155.
Science quotes on:  |  Call (781)  |  Development (441)  |  Elaborate (31)  |  Elaborated (7)  |  Follow (389)  |  Forward (104)  |  Growth (200)  |  Humanity (186)  |  Law (913)  |  Pressure (69)  |  Soul (235)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thought (995)  |  Wide (97)  |  World (1850)

Nernst was a great admirer of Shakespeare, and it is said that in a conference concerned with naming units after appropriate persons, he proposed that the unit of rate of liquid flow should be called the falstaff.
'The Nemst Memorial Lecture', Journal of the Chemical Society (1953), Part 3, 2855.
Science quotes on:  |  Admiration (61)  |  Admirer (9)  |  Appropriate (61)  |  Call (781)  |  Concern (239)  |  Conference (18)  |  Falstaff (2)  |  Flow (89)  |  Great (1610)  |  Liquid (50)  |  Walther Hermann Nernst (5)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Person (366)  |  Rate (31)  |  Unit (36)

I had at one time a very bad fever of which I almost died. In my fever I had a long consistent delirium. I dreamt that I was in Hell, and that Hell is a place full of all those happenings that are improbable but not impossible. The effects of this are curious. Some of the damned, when they first arrive below, imagine that they will beguile the tedium of eternity by games of cards. But they find this impossible, because, whenever a pack is shuffled, it comes out in perfect order, beginning with the Ace of Spades and ending with the King of Hearts. There is a special department of Hell for students of probability. In this department there are many typewriters and many monkeys. Every time that a monkey walks on a typewriter, it types by chance one of Shakespeare's sonnets. There is another place of torment for physicists. In this there are kettles and fires, but when the kettles are put on the fires, the water in them freezes. There are also stuffy rooms. But experience has taught the physicists never to open a window because, when they do, all the air rushes out and leaves the room a vacuum.
'The Metaphysician's Nightmare', Nightmares of Eminent Persons and Other Stories (1954), 38-9.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Arrival (15)  |  Bad (185)  |  Beginning (312)  |  Chance (244)  |  Consistent (50)  |  Curiosity (138)  |  Curious (95)  |  Damned (4)  |  Death (406)  |  Delirium (3)  |  Department (93)  |  Do (1905)  |  Dream (222)  |  Effect (414)  |  Eternity (64)  |  Experience (494)  |  Fever (34)  |  Find (1014)  |  Fire (203)  |  First (1302)  |  Freeze (6)  |  Game (104)  |  Happening (59)  |  Heart (243)  |  Hell (32)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Imagine (176)  |  Impossibility (60)  |  Impossible (263)  |  Improbable (15)  |  Kettle (3)  |  Long (778)  |  Monkey (57)  |  Never (1089)  |  Open (277)  |  Opening (15)  |  Order (638)  |  Perfect (223)  |  Perfection (131)  |  Physicist (270)  |  Possibility (172)  |  Probability (135)  |  Room (42)  |  Rush (18)  |  Shuffle (7)  |  Sonnet (5)  |  Special (188)  |  Student (317)  |  Tedium (3)  |  Time (1911)  |  Torment (18)  |  Type (171)  |  Typewriter (6)  |  Vacuum (41)  |  Walk (138)  |  Water (503)  |  Whenever (81)  |  Will (2350)  |  Window (59)

There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write—words.
In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1966, 1986), 64. Excerpted in Richard Dawkins, ‘Creation and Natural Selection’. New Scientist (25 Sep 1986), 111, 38.
Science quotes on:  |  Cliche (8)  |  Computer (131)  |  Creative (144)  |  Creativity (84)  |  Do (1905)  |  Exactly (14)  |  Exception (74)  |  First (1302)  |  Input (2)  |  More (2558)  |  Never (1089)  |  Output (12)  |  Popular (34)  |  Say (989)  |  Sense (785)  |  Teacher (154)  |  Tell (344)  |  Trivial (59)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Word (650)  |  Write (250)  |  Writing (192)

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?
The Two Cultures: The Rede Lecture (1959), 15-6.
Science quotes on:  |  Ask (420)  |  Asking (74)  |  Cold (115)  |  Company (63)  |  Considerable (75)  |  Culture (157)  |  Describe (132)  |  Educated (12)  |  Equivalent (46)  |  Gather (76)  |  Gathering (23)  |  Good (906)  |  Illiteracy (8)  |  Incredulity (5)  |  Law (913)  |  Negative (66)  |  People (1031)  |  Present (630)  |  Read (308)  |  Reading (136)  |  Response (56)  |  Science Literacy (6)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Scientific Illiteracy (8)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Second Law Of Thermodynamics (14)  |  Something (718)  |  Standard (64)  |  Thermodynamics (40)  |  Thought (995)  |  Time (1911)  |  Traditional (16)  |  Work (1402)

One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.
Variety of Men (1966), 87. First published in Commentary magazine.
Science quotes on:  |  Achievement (187)  |  Addition (70)  |  Archimedes (63)  |  Class (168)  |  Cricket (8)  |  Denote (6)  |  Einstein (101)  |  Albert Einstein (624)  |  Excellence (40)  |  Field (378)  |  Ground (222)  |  G. H. Hardy (71)  |  Human (1512)  |  Idiom (5)  |  Include (93)  |  Kind (564)  |  Last (425)  |  Vladimir Lenin (3)  |  Lifetime (40)  |  Literature (116)  |  Mention (84)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Other (2233)  |  Personal (75)  |  Politics (122)  |  Qualified (12)  |  Return (133)  |  Talking (76)  |  Time (1911)  |  Count Leo Tolstoy (18)  |  Two (936)  |  University (130)  |  Visit (27)  |  War (233)  |  World (1850)

Ode to The Amoeba
Recall from Time's abysmal chasm
That piece of primal protoplasm
The First Amoeba, strangely splendid,
From whom we're all of us descended.
That First Amoeba, weirdly clever,
Exists today and shall forever,
Because he reproduced by fission;
He split himself, and each division
And subdivision deemed it fitting
To keep on splitting, splitting, splitting;
So, whatsoe'er their billions be,
All, all amoebas still are he.
Zoologists discern his features
In every sort of breathing creatures,
Since all of every living species,
No matter how their breed increases
Or how their ranks have been recruited,
From him alone were evoluted.
King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba
And Hoover sprang from that amoeba;
Columbus, Shakespeare, Darwin, Shelley
Derived from that same bit of jelly.
So famed is he and well-connected,
His statue ought to be erected,
For you and I and William Beebe
Are undeniably amoebae!
(1922). Collected in Gaily the Troubadour (1936), 18.
Science quotes on:  |  Abyss (30)  |  Alone (324)  |  Amoeba (21)  |  William Beebe (5)  |  Billion (104)  |  Breathing (23)  |  Breed (26)  |  Chasm (9)  |  Clever (41)  |  Christopher Columbus (16)  |  Connect (126)  |  Creature (242)  |  Charles Darwin (322)  |  Descend (49)  |  Discern (35)  |  Division (67)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Exist (458)  |  First (1302)  |  Fission (10)  |  Forever (111)  |  Himself (461)  |  Herbert Hoover (13)  |  Increase (225)  |  Jelly (6)  |  Life (1870)  |  Living (492)  |  Matter (821)  |  Ode (3)  |  Poem (104)  |  Primal (5)  |  Protoplasm (13)  |  Rank (69)  |  Reproduction (74)  |   Mary Shelley (9)  |  Species (435)  |  Splendid (23)  |  Split (15)  |  Statue (17)  |  Still (614)  |  Time (1911)  |  Today (321)  |  Zoologist (12)

By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.
'The Case of Leavis and the Serious Case’, Times Literary Supplement (9 Jul 1970), 737-740. Collected in Public Affairs (1971), 95.
Science quotes on:  |  Alive (97)  |  Better (493)  |  Decent (12)  |  Do (1905)  |  Experience (494)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Man (2252)  |  More (2558)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Old (499)  |  Physic (515)  |  Physics (564)  |  Say (989)  |  Student (317)  |  Understand (648)  |  Understanding (527)  |  Will (2350)  |  Year (963)

There is only one subject matter for education, and that is Life in all its manifestations. Instead of this single unity, we offer children—Algebra, from which nothing follows; Geometry, from which nothing follows; Science, from which nothing follows; History, from which nothing follows; a Couple of Languages, never mastered; and lastly, most dreary of all, Literature, represented by plays of Shakespeare, with philological notes and short analyses of plot and character to be in substance committed to memory.
In 'The Aims of Education', The Aims of Education: & Other Essays (1917), 10.
Science quotes on:  |  Algebra (117)  |  Analysis (244)  |  Character (259)  |  Children (201)  |  Dreary (6)  |  Education (423)  |  Follow (389)  |  Geometry (271)  |  History (716)  |  Language (308)  |  Life (1870)  |  Literature (116)  |  Manifestation (61)  |  Master (182)  |  Mastery (36)  |  Matter (821)  |  Memory (144)  |  Most (1728)  |  Never (1089)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Offer (142)  |  Plot (11)  |  Represent (157)  |  Short (200)  |  Single (365)  |  Subject (543)  |  Substance (253)  |  Unity (81)

This quality of genius is, sometimes, difficult to be distinguished from talent, because high genius includes talent. It is talent, and something more. The usual distinction between genius and talent is, that one represents creative thought, the other practical skill: one invents, the other applies. But the truth is, that high genius applies its own inventions better than talent alone can do. A man who has mastered the higher mathematics, does not, on that account, lose his knowledge of arithmetic. Hannibal, Napoleon, Shakespeare, Newton, Scott, Burke, Arkwright, were they not men of talent as well as men of genius?
In 'Genius', Wellman’s Miscellany (Dec 1871), 4, No. 6, 203.
Science quotes on:  |  Account (195)  |  Alone (324)  |  Apply (170)  |  Arithmetic (144)  |  Sir Richard Arkwright (3)  |  Better (493)  |  Emperor Napoléon Bonaparte (20)  |  Edmund Burke (14)  |  Creative (144)  |  Difficult (263)  |  Distinction (72)  |  Distinguish (168)  |  Distinguished (84)  |  Do (1905)  |  Genius (301)  |  High (370)  |  Include (93)  |  Invention (400)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Lose (165)  |  Man (2252)  |  Master (182)  |  Mastery (36)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  More (2558)  |  Napoleon (16)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Other (2233)  |  Practical (225)  |  Quality (139)  |  Represent (157)  |  Scott_Walter (2)  |  Skill (116)  |  Something (718)  |  Talent (99)  |  Thought (995)  |  Truth (1109)

If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Michelangelo painted, as Beethoven composed music, as Shakespeare wrote his plays.
As quoted, without citation, in Patricia J. Raskin, Pathfinding: Seven Principles for Positive Living (2002), 102.
Science quotes on:  |  Beethoven (14)  |  Beethoven_Ludwig (8)  |  Compose (20)  |  Living (492)  |   Michelangelo, (3)  |  Music (133)  |  Paint (22)  |  Person (366)  |  Play (116)  |  Street (25)  |  Sweep (22)  |  Write (250)

Shakespeare was pursuing two Methods at once; and besides the Psychological Method, he had also to attend to the Poetical. (Note) we beg pardon for the use of this insolent verbum: but it is one of which our Language stands in great need. We have no single term to express the Philosophy of the Human Mind.
Science quotes on:  |  Attend (67)  |  Express (192)  |  Great (1610)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Mind (133)  |  Language (308)  |  Method (531)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Pardon (7)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Poetry (150)  |  Psychological (42)  |  Psychology (166)  |  Pursuing (27)  |  Single (365)  |  Stand (284)  |  Term (357)  |  Two (936)  |  Use (771)

No other part of science has contributed as much to the liberation of the human spirit as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yet, at the same time, few other parts of science are held to be so recondite. Mention of the Second Law raises visions of lumbering steam engines, intricate mathematics, and infinitely incomprehensible entropy. Not many would pass C.P. Snow’s test of general literacy, in which not knowing the Second Law is equivalent to not having read a work of Shakespeare.
In The Second Law (1984), Preface, vii.
Science quotes on:  |  Contribution (93)  |  Engine (99)  |  Entropy (46)  |  Equivalent (46)  |  General (521)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Spirit (12)  |  Incomprehensible (31)  |  Intricate (29)  |  Knowing (137)  |  Law (913)  |  Liberation (12)  |  Literacy (10)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Mention (84)  |  Obscure (66)  |  Other (2233)  |  Pass (241)  |  Read (308)  |  Recondite (8)  |  Second Law Of Thermodynamics (14)  |  Snow (39)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Steam (81)  |  Steam Engine (47)  |  Test (221)  |  Thermodynamics (40)  |  Time (1911)  |  Vision (127)  |  Work (1402)

Take nature out of Shakespeare and it would be incalculably impoverished; without his bunch of radish or shotten herring Falstaff wouldn’t be truly Falstaff, nor would Ophelia’s lament be so poignant without her rosemary for remembrance and rue for you.
In 'Fifty Years On, the Silence of Rachel Carson’s Spring Consumes Us', The Guardian (25 Sep 2012).
Science quotes on:  |  Falstaff (2)  |  Herring (4)  |  Impoverished (3)  |  Lament (11)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Ophelia (2)  |  Poignant (3)  |  Remembrance (5)  |  Truly (118)

One can learn imitation history—kings and dates, but not the slightest idea of the motives behind it all; imitation literature—stacks of notes on Shakespeare’s phrases, and a complete destruction of the power to enjoy Shakespeare.
In Mathematician's Delight (1943), 8.
Science quotes on:  |  Behind (139)  |  Complete (209)  |  Date (14)  |  Destruction (135)  |  Enjoy (48)  |  History (716)  |  Idea (881)  |  Imitation (24)  |  King (39)  |  Learn (672)  |  Literature (116)  |  Motive (62)  |  Note (39)  |  Phrase (61)  |  Power (771)  |  Slight (32)  |  Stack (3)

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs—putting in his oar, so to speak—with some pat word or phrase.
In 'All Sorts of a Paper: Being Stray Leaves From a Note-Book', The Atlantic (1902), 90, No. 542, 739.
Science quotes on:  |  Linguistics (39)  |  Word (650)

“On doit etre etonné ([Abbé Raynal]says) que l'Amerique n’ait pas encore produit un bon poëte, un habile mathematicien, un homme de génie dans un seul art, ou une seule science.” …“America has not yet produced one good poet.” When we shall have existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton, should this reproach be still true, we will enquire from what unfriendly causes it has proceeded, that the other countries of Europe and quarters of the earth shall not have inscribed any name in the roll of poets. But neither has America produced “one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.” … In physics we have produced a [Benjamin] Franklin, than whom no one of the present age has made more important discoveries, nor has enriched philosophy with more, or more ingenious solutions of the phaenomena, of nature. … [The quadrant invented by Godfrey, an American also, and with the aid of which the European nations traverse the globe, is called Hadley’s quadrant.] … We have supposed Mr. [David] Rittenhouse second to no astronomer living: that in genius he must be the first, because he is self-taught. As an artist he has exhibited as great a proof of mechanical genius as the world has ever produced. … We therefore suppose, that this reproach is as unjust as it is unkind; and that, of the geniuses which adorn the present age, America contributes its full share. [Compared to the much larger populations of European countries.]
The reference given by Jefferson for the original reproach by Abbé Raynal, an ellipsis above, is “7. Hist. Philos. p. 92. ed. Maestricht. 1774”. The original remark written in French, translates as: “One must be amazed that America has not yet produced a good poet, an able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art, or a single science.” Jefferson uses parts of it in English, to introduce his rebuttal. From Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), 107-110. A footnote adds that: “In a later edition of the Abbé Raynal’s work, he has withdrawn his censure…”
Science quotes on:  |  American (56)  |  Astronomer (97)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Benjamin Franklin (95)  |  Genius (301)  |  Greek (109)  |  Homer (11)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  John Milton (31)  |  Physics (564)  |  Poet (97)  |  Research (753)  |  David Rittenhouse (6)  |  Roman (39)  |  Science And Art (195)  |   Virgil (7)  |  Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire (42)

Do you think that the amoeba ever dreamed that it would evolve into the frog? Of course it didn’t. And when that first frog shimmied out of the water and employed its vocal chords in order to attract a mate or to retard a predator, do you think that that frog ever imagined that that incipient croak would evolve into all the languages of the world, into all the literature of the world? Of course it … didn’t. And just as that froggy could never possibly have conceived of Shakespeare, so we can never possibly imagine our destiny.
Movie
Fictional character, Johnny, in the movie Naked (1993), written and directed by Mike Leigh.
Science quotes on:  |  Amoeba (21)  |  Croak (2)  |  Destiny (54)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Frog (44)  |  Language (308)  |  Literature (116)

The famous principle of indeterminacy is not as negative as it appears. It limits the applicability of classical concepts to atomic events in order to make room for new phenomena such as the wave-particle duality. The uncertainty principle has made our understanding richer, not poorer; it permits us to include atomic reality in the framework of classical concepts. To quote from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
In Scientific American as quoted in epigraph, in Barbara Lovett Cline, The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory (1965), 235. Weisskopf was replying to James R Newman’s statement beginning “In this century the professional philosophers…” on this site’s webpage of James R. Newman Quotations.
Science quotes on:  |  Applicability (7)  |  Atomic (6)  |  Classical (49)  |  Concept (242)  |  Dream (222)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Event (222)  |  Framework (33)  |  Hamlet (10)  |  Heaven (266)  |  Limit (294)  |  New (1273)  |  Phenomenon (334)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Quote (46)  |  Reality (274)  |  Uncertainty Principle (9)  |  Understand (648)  |  Wave-Particle Duality (3)

I should feel it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in the way that Homer and Euclid are.
In The Ascent of Man (2011), 329. Although printed within single quote marks, these words are presumably not verbatim, but only a narrative recollection of a conversation with the author (during WWII, in a taxi, about von Neumann’s Theory of Games).
Science quotes on:  |  Ascent Of Man (7)  |  Euclid (60)  |  Fossil (143)  |  History (716)  |  Homer (11)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Loss (117)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (363)  |  Sense (785)  |  Year (963)

How came it to pass that a man with no peculiar advantages of early education grew to be so many-sided as Shakespeare, and with every side so equal?
From 'The Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne', North American Review (Sep 1879), No. 274, 203. Collected in Anthony Trollope, Miscellaneous Essays and Reviews (1981).
Science quotes on:  |  Advantage (144)  |  Education (423)  |  Equal (88)  |  Many-Sided (2)  |  Side (236)


See also:
  • Shakespeare on Earth's Gravity - Quotes that seem to reference the effects of Earth's gravity, long before Isaac Newton identified his Law of Gravitation, as discussed in The Galaxy (Dec 1867).

Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.