Experimentation Quotes

“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
― Thomas A. Edison

“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“The San Francisco therapist kept telling me I shouldn’t be terrified of creative experimentation.
“I don’t know what’s going to come out of me,” I told her. “It has to be perfect. It has to be irreproachable in every way.”
“Why?” she said.
“To make up for it,” I said. “To make up for the fact that it’s me.”
― Suzanne Rivecca

“I didn't want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that's the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The TV scientist who mutters sadly, "The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for," is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or another.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Wisdom is nothing more than confirmed imagination: just because one did not study for his exam does not mean that he should leave it blank.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Doing risk sport had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.”
― Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

“mental meandering and personal experimentation are sources of power, and head starts are overrated”
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

“Most of the time in my work, I begin with the answers, with an idea of the results. I suspect that something is true and then I work toward that suspicion, experimenting, tinkering, until I find what I am looking for. The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has already been asked, trying to make it all matter.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“I ended your experiment. Because you're not a scientist. You're a monster. I'm not leaving any of them at your mercy.”
― Rachel Caine, Fall of Night

“When the wounded mouse finally died, I held his little body. I rubbed the top of his head, and I thought of it as a blessing, a baptism. Whenever I fed the mice or weighed them for the lever-press task, I always thought of Jesus in the upper room, washing his disciples' feet. This moment of servitude, of being quite literally brought low, always reminded me that I needed these mice just as much as they needed me. More. What would I know about the brain without them? How could I perform my work, find answers to my questions? The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because I'm aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“Can you create protected spaces to experiment, tinker and answer important questions with no current answers?”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Wandering allows for exploration, constant trial and error, and imperfection.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“it’s always the patient who has to take the chance when an experiment is necessary. And we can find out nothing without experiment.”
― George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma

“Mrs. Pasternack said something else that year that I never forgot. She said, "The truth is we don't know what we don't know. We don't even know the questions we need to ask in order to find out, but when we learn one tiny little thing, a dim light comes on in a dark hallways, and suddenly a new question appears. We spend decades, centuries, millennia, trying to answer that one question so that another dim light will come on. That's science, but that's also everything else, isn't it? Try. Experiment. Ask a ton of questions.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“To remain with a lover permanently, or at least for any significant period of time, had always seemed to me so limiting, so much like putting up a door, albeit a beautiful, elaborately carven door, between myself and the dark, mysterious entrance to the unknown, the unseen, the unexperienced; a door that closed those things off to me. It gave happiness, in my experience, to remain with a lover over some weeks or months, to explore them, to become comfortable with them, to express myself to the fullest extent that I thought they would accept. Over too long a period, however, I always found myself beginning to yearn for those things I was not receiving; those other forms of happiness that loyalty to one person caused to become inaccessible – to be glimpsed from afar yet always untasted, untouched, unfelt.”
― Yasmine Millett, The Erotic Notebooks

“On the one hand, it is said that the animals are so unlike us that they are not worthy of our consideration. On the other hand, vivisectors claim that animals are so like us that they are essential to research. In these conflicting statements we see a researcher's own confusion as to the genuine nature of his "subjects," and their nature in relation to this own.”
― Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery

“All the world is a laboratory to the inquiring mind”
― Martin H. Fischer

“Experiments are the fastest and guaranteed way to learn.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“I found it concerning the sleep clinic had prescribed a setting that made me sick and this matched my findings with the CPAP machine that these CPAP and BiPAP prescriptions are highly inaccurate! Approximately 50% of people that are prescribed these treatments abandon them and a poor prescription setting is likely a factor in this. It takes weeks of experimentation to find the correct setting of these machines and sleep clinics trying to do it in one night is just providing many sickened patients with a really bad healthcare experience.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“Experimentation with sleeping supplements is required to find out which ones produce the best response.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“We will not sacrifice our children at the altar of fear.”
― Jessica Marie Baumgartner

“Every business plan begins with a side of assumptions… Because the assumptions haven’t been proved to be true (they are assumptions, after all) and in fact are often erroneous, the goal of a startup’s early efforts should be to test them as quickly as possible”
― Ries Eric, The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

“He released an immense power here, if only for a moment.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, The Gathering Elements

“Innovation is born at the intersection of curiosity and courage. Those who dare to ask questions others ignore and experiment where others hesitate are the ones who shape the future. Success does not come from avoiding failure, but from learning to rise every time you fall.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“Science is the patient pursuit of truth, revealing the secrets of the universe one discovery at a time. Curiosity fuels inquiry, and persistence turns questions into knowledge. Every experiment, no matter how small, contributes to the vast mosaic of human understanding.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“To ensure superstupidity is not our future, updating our education system should become an existential priority. Education’s effectiveness should be evaluated on whether it can help humanity become future-ready for our complex 21st century. We should inspire passion, nurture curiosity, emphasize uncertainty, develop range, and use critical thinking to examine assumptions. Most importantly, we need to form new relationships with inquiry, experimentation, and failure (which goes hand in hand with creativity). These features can help us problem-solve out of the most existential risks. Today’s standard knowledge will never solve tomorrow’s surprises.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Deviations from standard results are not failures, but opportunities for new questions to be asked and ideas to be tested.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World