In case you haven't glanced at them, just a few of the quotes that are part of the "Just Some Quotes" link in left-hand margin, to take you into the weekend:
"If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain... In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar." -- Richard Feynman
"It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them."
-- Arthur C. Clarke, 1963
"It's like religion. Heresy [in science] is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite." -- Dr. Thomas Gold
"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it." -- Carl Sagan, 1987
"Modern science should indeed arouse in all of us a humility before the immensity of the unexplored and a tolerance for crazy hypotheses." -- Martin Gardner
"I ask you, which is the greater threat to science and mankind, accepting a claim that can have no possible benefit, or rejecting a claim that can have great benefit?" -- Dr. Edmund Storms
"What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out." -- Bertrand Russell
"If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day."
-- J. A. Wheeler
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity." -- T. H. Huxley
"The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively not by the false appearance of things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice."
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." -- Sir Martin Rees (astronomer)
"Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers."
-- Bernhard Haisch, astrophysicist
"...By far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them." -- William James
"Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected." -- Richard Feynman
"One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike -- and yet it is the most precious thing we have." -- Einstein
"We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang," all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead." -- Lewis Thomas
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny...' " -- Isaac Asimov
"The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature... It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect." -- Lewis Thomas
"Sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." -- T.H. Huxley
"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
-- William James
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