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: “Nature does nothing in vain when less will serve; for Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index R > Category: Romance

Romance Quotes (18 quotes)

And so, after many years, victory has come, and the romance of exploration, of high hopes and bitter disappointment, will in a few years simply be recorded in the text-books of organic chemistry in a few terse sentences.
Recent Developments in the Vitamin A Field', The Pedlar Lecture, 4 Dec 1947, Journal of the Chemical Society, Part I (1948), 393.
Science quotes on:  |  Bitter (30)  |  Book (413)  |  Chemistry (376)  |  Disappointment (18)  |  Exploration (161)  |  High (370)  |  Hope (321)  |  Organic (161)  |  Organic Chemistry (41)  |  Record (161)  |  Research (753)  |  Victory (40)  |  Vitamin (13)  |  Will (2350)  |  Year (963)

Basic research at universities comes in two varieties: research that requires big bucks and research that requires small bucks. Big bucks research is much like government research and in fact usually is government research but done for the government under contract. Like other government research, big bucks academic research is done to understand the nature and structure of the universe or to understand life, which really means that it is either for blowing up the world or extending life, whichever comes first. Again, that's the government's motivation. The universities' motivation for conducting big bucks research is to bring money in to support professors and graduate students and to wax the floors of ivy-covered buildings. While we think they are busy teaching and learning, these folks are mainly doing big bucks basic research for a living, all the while priding themselves on their terrific summer vacations and lack of a dress code.
Smalls bucks research is the sort of thing that requires paper and pencil, and maybe a blackboard, and is aimed primarily at increasing knowledge in areas of study that don't usually attract big bucks - that is, areas that don't extend life or end it, or both. History, political science, and romance languages are typically small bucks areas of basic research. The real purpose of small bucks research to the universities is to provide a means of deciding, by the quality of their small bucks research, which professors in these areas should get tenure.
Accidental Empires (1992), 78.
Science quotes on:  |  Academic (20)  |  Aim (175)  |  Basic (144)  |  Basic Research (15)  |  Blackboard (11)  |  Blowing (22)  |  Both (496)  |  Building (158)  |  Code (31)  |  Doing (277)  |  End (603)  |  Extend (129)  |  Fact (1257)  |  First (1302)  |  Government (116)  |  Graduate (32)  |  Graduate Student (13)  |  History (716)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Lack (127)  |  Language (308)  |  Learning (291)  |  Life (1870)  |  Living (492)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Money (178)  |  Motivation (28)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Other (2233)  |  Paper (192)  |  Pencil (20)  |  Political (124)  |  Political Science (3)  |  Professor (133)  |  Purpose (336)  |  Quality (139)  |  Require (229)  |  Research (753)  |  Small (489)  |  Structure (365)  |  Student (317)  |  Study (701)  |  Summer (56)  |  Support (151)  |  Teaching (190)  |  Tenure (8)  |  Terrific (4)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1122)  |  Two (936)  |  Understand (648)  |  Universe (900)  |  University (130)  |  Usually (176)  |  Wax (13)  |  World (1850)

From this time everything was copulated. Acetic, formic, butyric, margaric, &c., acids, alkaloids, ethers, amides, anilides, all became copulated bodies. So that to make acetanilide, for example, they no longer employed acetic acid and aniline, but they re-copulated a copulated oxalic acid with a copulated ammonia. I am inventing nothing—altering nothing. Is it my fault if, when writing history, I appear to be composing a romance?
Chemical Method (1855), 204.
Science quotes on:  |  Acetic Acid (2)  |  Acid (83)  |  Ammonia (15)  |  Aniline (2)  |  Copulation (2)  |  Employ (115)  |  Ether (37)  |  Everything (489)  |  Fault (58)  |  History (716)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Time (1911)  |  Writing (192)

I consider [H. G. Wells], as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise, but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using in their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. ... The creations of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, belong unreservedly to an age and degree of scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say entirely beyond the limits of the possible.
Gordon Jones, 'Jules Verne at Home', Temple Bar (Jun 1904), 129, 670.
Science quotes on:  |  Actual (118)  |  Age (509)  |  Belong (168)  |  Beyond (316)  |  Call (781)  |  Consider (428)  |  Construction (114)  |  Creation (350)  |  Degree (277)  |  Different (595)  |  Engineering (188)  |  Fact (1257)  |  High (370)  |  Invention (400)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Limit (294)  |  Material (366)  |  Method (531)  |  Other (2233)  |  Point (584)  |  Possible (560)  |  Present (630)  |  Purely (111)  |  Say (989)  |  Science Fiction (35)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Skill (116)  |  So-Called (71)  |  Herbert George (H.G.) Wells (41)  |  Will (2350)  |  Writer (90)

I have always liked horticulturists, people who make their living from orchards and gardens, whose hands are familiar with the feel of the bark, whose eyes are trained to distinguish the different varieties, who have a form memory. Their brains are not forever dealing with vague abstractions; they are satisfied with the romance which the seasons bring with them, and have the patience and fortitude to gamble their lives and fortunes in an industry which requires infinite patience, which raise hopes each spring and too often dashes them to pieces in fall. They are always conscious of sun and wind and rain; must always be alert lest they lose the chance of ploughing at the right moment, pruning at the right time, circumventing the attacks of insects and fungus diseases by quick decision and prompt action. They are manufacturers of a high order, whose business requires not only intelligence of a practical character, but necessitates an instinct for industry which is different from that required by the city dweller always within sight of other people and the sound of their voices. The successful horticulturist spends much time alone among his trees, away from the constant chatter of human beings.
Science quotes on:  |  Abstraction (48)  |  Action (342)  |  Alert (13)  |  Alone (324)  |  Attack (86)  |  Bark (19)  |  Being (1276)  |  Brain (281)  |  Business (156)  |  Chance (244)  |  Character (259)  |  City (87)  |  Constant (148)  |  Decision (98)  |  Different (595)  |  Disease (340)  |  Distinguish (168)  |  Eye (440)  |  Fall (243)  |  Feel (371)  |  Forever (111)  |  Form (976)  |  Fortune (50)  |  Fungus (8)  |  Garden (64)  |  High (370)  |  Hope (321)  |  Horticulture (10)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Being (185)  |  Industry (159)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Insect (89)  |  Instinct (91)  |  Intelligence (218)  |  Live (650)  |  Living (492)  |  Lose (165)  |  Memory (144)  |  Moment (260)  |  Must (1525)  |  Order (638)  |  Other (2233)  |  Patience (58)  |  People (1031)  |  Practical (225)  |  Prompt (14)  |  Pruning (7)  |  Rain (70)  |  Require (229)  |  Required (108)  |  Right (473)  |  Season (47)  |  Sight (135)  |  Sound (187)  |  Spend (97)  |  Spring (140)  |  Successful (134)  |  Sun (407)  |  Time (1911)  |  Train (118)  |  Tree (269)  |  Vague (50)  |  Wind (141)

I just had a romance that I really care about, a lot—I mean, a lot—go up in smoke. Because of the stress, and the sort of other woman that Macintosh is.
Jobs blamed his obsession with work at Apple on the soon-to-be-released Macintosh for a breakup. Interview with Rolling Stone writer, Steven Levy (late Nov 1983). As quoted in Nick Bilton, 'The 30-Year-Old Macintosh and a Lost Conversation With Steve Jobs' (24 Jan 2014), on New York Times blog web page. Levy appended a transcript of the interview to an updated Kindle version of his book, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything.
Science quotes on:  |  Care (203)  |  Lot (151)  |  Macintosh (3)  |  Mean (810)  |  Other (2233)  |  Smoke (32)  |  Stress (22)  |  Woman (160)

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works—that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), 159.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Beauty (313)  |  Blue (63)  |  Color (155)  |  Doing (277)  |  Enquiry (89)  |  Figure (162)  |  Know (1538)  |  Light (635)  |  Little (717)  |  Mystery (188)  |  Passion (121)  |  Reason (766)  |  Red (38)  |  Reflection (93)  |  Research (753)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Sky (174)  |  Sunset (27)  |  Transparent (16)  |  Understand (648)  |  Wave (112)  |  Wavelength (10)  |  Way (1214)  |  White (132)  |  White Light (5)  |  Work (1402)  |  World (1850)

Many luckless people imagine that romance is dead: some, overcivilised, fondly suppose that there never was romance: a poet tells us that romance is unrecognised though really present: but scientists can meet him daily, walking at large and undisguised in the world.
A.V. Hill
In speech at Nobel Banquet, Stockholm (10 Dec 1923). Collected in Carl Gustaf Santesson (ed.), Les Prix Nobel en 1921-1922 (1923).
Science quotes on:  |  Daily (91)  |  Dead (65)  |  Imagine (176)  |  Large (398)  |  Meet (36)  |  Poet (97)  |  Present (630)  |  Science And Poetry (17)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Suppose (158)  |  Undisguised (2)  |  Walk (138)  |  World (1850)

Philosophers, if they have much imagination, are apt to let it loose as well as other people, and in such cases are sometimes led to mistake a fancy for a fact. Geologists, in particular, have very frequently amused themselves in this way, and it is not a little amusing to follow them in their fancies and their waking dreams. Geology, indeed, in this view, may be called a romantic science.
Conversations on Geology (1840), 5.
Science quotes on:  |  Amusement (37)  |  Call (781)  |  Dream (222)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Fancy (50)  |  Follow (389)  |  Geologist (82)  |  Geology (240)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Indeed (323)  |  Little (717)  |  Loose (14)  |  Mistake (180)  |  Other (2233)  |  Particular (80)  |  People (1031)  |  Philosopher (269)  |  Romantic (13)  |  Themselves (433)  |  View (496)  |  Waking (17)  |  Way (1214)

Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be, — a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, “Providence.”
In 'Table-Talk', The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Volume 3 (1883), 1354.
Science quotes on:  |  Avoid (123)  |  Change (639)  |  Corner (59)  |  Current (122)  |  Dark (145)  |  Enigma (16)  |  Evil (122)  |  Friend (180)  |  Good (906)  |  Great (1610)  |  Happen (282)  |  Impending (5)  |  Instead (23)  |  Life (1870)  |  Meet (36)  |  Minute (129)  |  Mysterious (83)  |  Occasion (87)  |  Possibility (172)  |  Possible (560)  |  Providence (19)  |  Psychology (166)  |  Slip (6)  |  Solution (282)  |  Sooner Or Later (7)  |  Speak (240)  |  Stop (89)  |  Street (25)  |  Turn (454)  |  Word (650)  |  World (1850)

Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, “an old and trained engineer,” and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.
In G.K. Chesterton, 'The Maxims of Maxim', Daily News (25 Feb 1905). Collected in G. K. Chesterton and Dale Ahlquist (ed.), In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton (2011), 87.
Science quotes on:  |  Biography (254)  |  Concentration (29)  |  Danger (127)  |  Dangerous (108)  |  Else (4)  |  Engineer (136)  |  Enthusiasm (59)  |  Everything (489)  |  Example (98)  |  Excitement (61)  |  Expression (181)  |  Full (68)  |  Genuine (54)  |  Happen (282)  |  Happened (88)  |  Hearty (3)  |  Himself (461)  |  Honorable (14)  |  Honour (58)  |  Indemnification (2)  |  Inhuman (4)  |  Little (717)  |  Logic (311)  |  Man (2252)  |  Sir Hiram Maxim (4)  |  Men Of Science (147)  |  Obvious (128)  |  Old (499)  |  Philosophy (409)  |  Physical (518)  |  Physical Science (104)  |  Poetry (150)  |  Real (159)  |  Required (108)  |  Requirement (66)  |  Romantic (13)  |  Romanticism (5)  |  Simplicity (175)  |  Superhuman (6)  |  Train (118)  |  Training (92)  |  Typical (16)  |  Vague (50)  |  Vagueness (15)

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance— the idea that anything is possible.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Begin (275)  |  Best (467)  |  Experience (494)  |  Idea (881)  |  Open (277)  |  Possible (560)  |  Scientist (881)

The graceful minuet-dance of fancy must give place to the toilsome, thorny pilgrimage of understanding.
On the transition from the age of romance to that of science.
In James Wood, Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (1893), 431:5.
Science quotes on:  |  Age (509)  |  Dance (35)  |  Fancy (50)  |  Must (1525)  |  Pilgrimage (4)  |  Transition (28)  |  Understanding (527)

The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars... A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.
Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Edwin E. Aldrin et al., First on the Moon (1970), 376.
Science quotes on:  |  Discipline (85)  |  Education (423)  |  Engineering (188)  |  Generation (256)  |  Greater (288)  |  Growing (99)  |  Hard (246)  |  Importance (299)  |  Inspiration (80)  |  Science And Engineering (16)  |  Space (523)  |  Space Program (9)  |  Value (393)  |  Whole (756)

The mathematics have always been the implacable enemies of scientific romances.
In Oeuvres (1866), t. 3, 498.
Science quotes on:  |  Enemy (86)  |  Implacable (4)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Nature Of Mathematics (80)  |  Scientific (955)

There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.
English Journey (1934), 123.
Science quotes on:  |  Battle (36)  |  Better (493)  |  Despair (40)  |  Development (441)  |  Fear (212)  |  Gamble (3)  |  Genuine (54)  |  Giant (73)  |  Great (1610)  |  History (716)  |  Hope (321)  |  Loneliness (6)  |  Lonely (24)  |  Manufacture (30)  |  Manufacturing (29)  |  Merely (315)  |  Novel (35)  |  Pioneer (37)  |  Raid (5)  |  Triumph (76)  |  Typewriter (6)

Those whose lives are so filled with the romance of discovery, whose years are a holiday of exploration, … their work itself is adequate reward, they have more happiness already than their share.
A.V. Hill
In speech at Nobel Banquet, Stockholm (10 Dec 1923). Collected in Carl Gustaf Santesson (ed.), Les Prix Nobel en 1921-1922 (1923).
Science quotes on:  |  Adequate (50)  |  Discovery (837)  |  Exploration (161)  |  Happiness (126)  |  Holiday (12)  |  Research (753)  |  Reward (72)  |  Work (1402)  |  Year (963)

Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraic symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed with value by its masters. A poetic symbol—like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris—comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw.
C.S. Lewis and E.M. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1936), 97.
Science quotes on:  |  Algebra (117)  |  Back (395)  |  Clothes (11)  |  Cloud (111)  |  Color (155)  |  Determine (152)  |  Distinguish (168)  |  Distinguished (84)  |  Do (1905)  |  Equation (138)  |  Explain (334)  |  Explanation (246)  |  Glory (66)  |  Kind (564)  |  Loss (117)  |  Love (328)  |  Man (2252)  |  Master (182)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Must (1525)  |  Naked (10)  |  Onion (9)  |  Poetry (150)  |  Raw (28)  |  Rewriting (2)  |  Rose (36)  |  See (1094)  |  Shape (77)  |  Still (614)  |  Study (701)  |  Surely (101)  |  Symbol (100)  |  Two (936)  |  Untouched (5)  |  Use (771)  |  Value (393)  |  Why (491)  |  Will (2350)  |  World (1850)


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.