A distinguished researcher once commented to me that a real scientist is someone who can think about a subject while talking to his or her spouse about something else.

The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.

We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself. The scientist is not the clever manipulator of instruments, he is the worshipper of nature and he bears the external symbols of his passion as does the follower of some religious order. To this body of real scientists belong those who, forgetting, like the Trappists of the Middle Ages, the world about them, live only in the laboratory, careless often in matters of food and dress because they no longer think of themselves; those who, through years of unwearied use of the microscope, become blind; those who in their scientific ardour inoculate themselves with tuberculosis germs; those who handle the excrement of cholera patients in their eagerness to learn the vehicle through which the diseases are transmitted; and those who, knowing that a certain chemical preparation may be an explosive, still persist in testing their theories at the risk of their lives. This is the spirit of the men of science, to whom nature freely reveals her secrets, crowning their labours with the glory of discovery. There exists, then, the "spirit" of the scientist, a thing far above his mere "mechanical skill," and the scientist is at the height of his achievement when the spirit has triumphed over the mechanism. When he has reached this point, science will receive from him not only new revelations of nature, but philosophic syntheses of pure thought.

Great scientists are persevering and never deterred by difficulties

Real scientists do not take vacations. They take field trips...

We all love a good fictional superhero, but real scientists, real people, have just as amazing powers!

A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.

The professor was lost in thought. He was disturbed and worried, but proud that he was behaving like a true scientist: he wasn’t losing his head, or panicking, or believing in miracles.

But you are a scientist, Michael Poole; and the skill of a scientist is in asking the right question.

Become the person who makes vague problems concrete, concrete problems tractable, and tractable problems solved.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

But he persevered. That was what a scientist did, confronted with an enigma.

One thing about a science: it works.
If an engineer knows his business, his bridge does not fall down.

The most successful scientist thinks like a poet — wide-ranging, sometimes fantastical — and works like a bookkeeper. It is the latter role that the world sees.