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: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index D > Category: Dragon

Dragon Quotes (6 quotes)

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons… . Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 10
Science quotes on:  |  Arent (6)  |  Belief (615)  |  Disprove (25)  |  Dream (222)  |  Everything (489)  |  Fairy (10)  |  Myth (58)  |  Nightmare (4)  |  Real (159)  |  Say (989)

Science has blown to atoms, as she can rend and rive in the rocks themselves; but in those rocks she has found, and read aloud, the great stone book which is the history of the earth, even when darkness sat upon the face of the deep. Along their craggy sides she has traced the footprints of birds and beasts, whose shapes were never seen by man. From within them she has brought the bones, and pieced together the skeletons, of monsters that would have crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow.
Book review of Robert Hunt, Poetry of Science (1848), in the London Examiner (1848). Although uncredited in print, biographers identified his authorship from his original handwritten work. Collected in Charles Dickens and Frederic George Kitton (ed.) Old Lamps for New Ones: And Other Sketches and Essays (1897), 87.
Science quotes on:  |  Atom (381)  |  Beast (58)  |  Bird (163)  |  Blow (45)  |  Bone (101)  |  Book (413)  |  Crag (6)  |  Crush (19)  |  Darkness (72)  |  Deep (241)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Fable (12)  |  Face (214)  |  Footprint (16)  |  Great (1610)  |  History (716)  |  Man (2252)  |  Monster (33)  |  Never (1089)  |  Piece (39)  |  Read (308)  |  Reading (136)  |  Rock (176)  |  Shape (77)  |  Side (236)  |  Skeleton (25)  |  Stone (168)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Together (392)  |  Tracing (3)

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.
In The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: V; Excursions and Poems (1906), 307.
Science quotes on:  |  Apple (46)  |  Celestial (53)  |  Fruit (108)  |  Golden (47)  |  Guard (19)  |  Hundred (240)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Labor (200)  |  Never (1089)  |  Pluck (5)  |  Pursuit (128)  |  Sleep (81)

There are many Green Dragons in this world of wayside inns, even as there are many White Harts, Red Lions, Silent Women and other incredible things.
In A Traveller in Little Things (1921), 9.
Science quotes on:  |  Green (65)  |  Incredible (43)  |  Inn (2)  |  Lion (23)  |  Other (2233)  |  Red (38)  |  Silent (31)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Wayside (4)  |  White (132)  |  Woman (160)  |  World (1850)

There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence of it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies? The trouble with the agnostic argument is that it can be applied to anything. There is an infinite number of hypothetical beliefs we could hold which we can’t positively disprove. On the whole, people don’t believe in most of them, such as fairies, unicorns, dragons, Father Christmas, and so on. But on the whole they do believe in a creator God, together with whatever particular baggage goes with the religion of their parents.
From speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (15 Apr 1992), published in the Independent newspaper. Included in excerpt in Alec Fisher, The Logic of Real Arguments (2004), 84. The full speech was reprinted in The Nullifidian, (Dec 1994). Transcribed online in the Richard Dawkins archive, article 89, titled: Lecture from 'The Nullifidian' (Dec 94).
Science quotes on:  |  Agnostic (10)  |  Apply (170)  |  Argument (145)  |  Belief (615)  |  Bottom (36)  |  Can�t (16)  |  Creator (97)  |  Disprove (25)  |  Evidence (267)  |  Fairy (10)  |  Father Christmas (2)  |  Garden (64)  |  God (776)  |  Hold (96)  |  Hypothetical (6)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Number (710)  |  Parent (80)  |  People (1031)  |  Positively (4)  |  Prove (261)  |  Religion (369)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Trouble (117)  |  Unicorn (4)

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.
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)  |  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)


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.