The assumption that nature is all there is and that nature has been governed by the same rules at all times and places makes it possible for natural science to be confident that it can explain such things as how life began.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2 000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

Traditionally scientists have treated the laws of physics as simply 'given ' elegant mathematical relationships that were somehow imprinted on the universe at its birth and fixed thereafter. Inquiry into the origin and nature of the laws was not regarded as a proper part of science.

Cosmologists have attempted to account for the day-to-day laws you find in textbooks in terms of fundamental 'superlaws ' but the superlaws themselves must still be accepted as brute facts. So maybe the ultimate laws of nature will always be off-limits to science.

For me science is already fantastical enough. Unlocking the secrets of nature with fundamental physics or cosmology or astrobiology leads you into a wonderland compared with which beliefs in things like alien abductions pale into insignificance.

Modem science then maintains on the one hand that nature both organic and inorganic strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency.

In general science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature Cell The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.

We have found that where science has progressed the farthest the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.

One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics.

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.

Nature engenders the science of painting.

The central task of science is to arrive stage by stage at a clearer comprehension of nature but this does not at all mean as it is sometimes claimed to mean a search for mastery over nature.

We have failed to protect science against speculative extensions of nature continuing to assign physical and mathematical properties to hypothetical entities beyond what is observable in nature.

There is no such thing as death. In nature nothing dies. From each sad remnant of decay some forms of life arise so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.

There were two sides to David Lean: on the one side he was kind of a rather stiff disciplined Englishman. And then he had this kind of romantic side to him. I think being true to both sides of your nature is important.

People want to hear about the extremes of human nature. They want things that are larger than their own lives and more romantic and not necessarily of their own experiences.