“We must keep our freedom of mind, and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.”

The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.

The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.

Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride.

When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted.

The terrain is everything; the germ is nothing.

The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.

The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.

The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.

A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.

We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.

Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.

Effects vary with the conditions which bring them to pass, but laws do not vary. Physiological and pathological states are ruled by the same forces; they differ only because of the special conditions under which the vital laws manifest themselves.

Priestley said that each discovery we make shows us many others that should be made.

With the aid of these active experimental sciences man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress of the experimental sciences.

The minds that rise and become really great are never self-satisfied, but still continue to strive.

But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

I don’t like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don’t really understand the word ‘irony’ too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it’s much more exalted.

I like darkness and confusion and absurdity, but I like to know that there could be a little door that you could go out into a safe life area of happiness.

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. That’s why I love coffee shops and public places – I mean, they’re all out there.

I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.

The idea of only someone else loving you is absurd. You need to learn to love yourself too.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.

To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree