Celebrating 23 Years on the Web
TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index C > Category: Can't

Can't Quotes (10 quotes)
Can't Quotes

Always listen to experts.They’ll tell you what can’t be done, and why. Then do it.
In 'From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long', Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 256.
Science quotes on:  |  Do (1905)  |  Expert (67)  |  Listen (78)  |  Tell (341)  |  Why (491)

Bees are not as busy as we think they are. They jest can’t buzz any slower.
As quoted in Henry Wysham Lanier, The Golden Book Magazine (1931), Vol. 13, 85.
Science quotes on:  |  Bee (42)  |  Busy (30)  |  Buzz (3)  |  Jest (5)  |  Slow (103)  |  Think (1096)

Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.
In 'From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long', Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 256.
Science quotes on:  |  Bet (12)  |  Certain (552)  |  Certainly (185)  |  Game (102)  |  Stop (82)  |  Win (53)

Cleveland, even now I can remember
Cause the Cuyahoga River
Goes smokin’ through my dreams
Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Now the Lord can make you tumble
And the Lord can make you turn
And the Lord can make you overflow
But the Lord can’t make you burn.
From lyrics of 'Burn On', released on LP album Sail Away (May 1972), track 8. The song 'Burn On' was used as the opening song in Major League (7 Apr 1989).
Science quotes on:  |  Burn (91)  |  Cause (549)  |  Cleveland (3)  |  Cuyahoga River (3)  |  Dream (217)  |  Lord (96)  |  Overflow (10)  |  Remember (186)  |  River (136)  |  Smoke (31)  |  Tumble (3)  |  Turn (450)

I would think I knew nothing in physics if I could say only how things could be but, without demonstrating that they can’t be otherwise.
From the original French, “Pour la Physique, ie croyrois n’y rien sçauoir, si ie ne sçauois que dire comment les choses peuuent estre, sans demonstrer qu’elles ne peuuent estre autrement,” in letter (11 Mar 1640) to Père Marin Mersenne, collected in Lettres de Mr Descartes (1659), Vol. 2, 213. As translated by John Cottingham, et al., (trans.), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 3, The Correspondence (1991), 145.
Science quotes on:  |  Demonstrate (78)  |  Know (1526)  |  Nothing (987)  |  Otherwise (25)  |  Physic (516)  |  Physics (550)  |  Say (985)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Think (1096)

I’ve tried to make the men around me feel as I do, that we are embarked as pioneers upon a new science and industry in which our problems are so new and unusual that it behooves no one to dismiss any novel idea with the statement, “It can’t be done.”
Start of Boeing’s quote, inscribed on his memorial at the Boeing Developmental Center, Tukwila, WA, as given in Mike Lombardi, 'Historical Perspective: 50 years at the Leading Edge', Boeing Frontiers (Aug 2009), 8.
Science quotes on:  |  Behoove (6)  |  Dismiss (11)  |  Do (1905)  |  Embark (7)  |  Feel (365)  |  Idea (861)  |  Industry (150)  |  New (1247)  |  Novel (34)  |  Pioneer (37)  |  Problem (708)  |  Statement (146)  |  Unusual (37)

The reptilian idea of fun
Is to bask all day in the sun.
A physiological barrier,
Discovered by Carrier,
Says they can't breathe, if they run.
Written about David Carrier’s rule concerning a vertebrate’s breathing when lungs are affected because the rib structure distorts during locomotion. Thus sprawling vertebrates cannot run and breathe at the same time. In sidebar to 'Respiration, Metabolism, and Locomotion', History of Life (1991), 177. Carrier’s constraint idea was published in 'The evolution of locomotor stamina in tetrapods: circumventing a mechanical constraint' Paleobiology (1987), 13, 326-341.
Science quotes on:  |  Barrier (34)  |  Breathe (46)  |  Discover (566)  |  Fun (41)  |  Idea (861)  |  Physiological (62)  |  Physiology (98)  |  Reptile (33)  |  Run (157)  |  Say (985)  |  Sun (402)

We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin). At the very least we need a sort of street-smart science: the ability to recognize evidence gather it assess it and act on it.
In Light Elements: Essays in Science from Gravity to Levity (1991), 14.
Science quotes on:  |  Ability (156)  |  Act (276)  |  Assess (4)  |  Einstein (101)  |  Albert Einstein (615)  |  Evidence (263)  |  Gather (74)  |  Play (113)  |  Recognize (129)  |  Smart (30)  |  Violin (6)

When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on. Put it aside till the next morning; and if then you can’t make it out, and have no one to explain it to you, put it aside entirely, and go back to that part of the subject which you do understand.
From letter to Edith Rix with hints for studying (about Mar 1885), in Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898), 240.
Science quotes on:  |  Back (392)  |  Do (1905)  |  Effort (233)  |  Explain (325)  |  Feel (365)  |  Learning (290)  |  Long (772)  |  Morning (95)  |  Next (236)  |  Puzzled (2)  |  Still (614)  |  Stop (82)  |  Studying (70)  |  Subject (532)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Thorough (40)  |  Understand (634)  |  Will (2352)

You can’t plough a field by turning it over in your mind.
Anonymous
Science quotes on:  |  Field (372)  |  Mind (1359)  |  Plough (14)  |  Turn (450)


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 |
- 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.