The record of a month's roulette playing at Monte Carlo can afford us material for discussing the foundations of knowledge.

There is no short cut to truth, no way to gain a knowledge of the universe except through the gateway of scientific method.

It is the old experience that a rude instrument in the hand of a master craftsman will achieve more than the finest tool wielded by the uninspired journeyman.

The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science, and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what may be termed the scientific frame of mind.

The mathematician, carried along on his flood of symbols, dealing apparently with purely formal truths, may still reach results of endless importance for our description of the physical universe.

The scientific method of examining facts is not peculiar to one class of phenomena and to one class of workers it is applicable to social as well as to physical problems, and we must carefully guard ourselves against supposing that the scientific frame of mind is a peculiarity of the professional scientist.

Medals are great encouragement to young men and lead them to feel their work is of value, I remember how keenly I felt this when in the 1890s. I received the Darwin Medal and the Huxley Medal. When one is old, one wants no encouragement and one goes on with one's work to the extent of one's power, because it has become habitual.

All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.

The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.