“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.”

“Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.”

“Psychology is the science of mental life”

“Science requires both observation and comprehension. Without observation there are no facts to be comprehended; without comprehension science is mere documentation. The basis for comprehension is theory, and the language of theoretical science is mathematics. Theory is constructed on a foundation of hypothesis; the fewer the hypotheses needed to explain existing observations and predict new phenomena, the more ‘elegant’ the theory”

“When I began to write fiction that I knew would be published as science fiction, [and] part of what I brought to it was the critical knowledge that science fiction was always about the period in which it was written.”

“The question of the relation between modernity and postmodernity revolves around the issue of 'legitimation.' Modernity, then, appeals to science to legitimate its claim - and by 'science' we simply mean the notion of a universal, autonomous reason. Science, then, is opposed to narrative, which attempts not to prove its claims but rather to proclaim them within a story.”

“The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them”