20 Writing Prompts from Scientist Quotes

Scientists say some pretty amazing things. Whether they are talking about science or not, they have a special way of looking at the world and communicating their ideas to others. Next time you set out to write a story, try using one of these scientist quotes as your prompt.

I hadn’t been aware that there were doors closed to me until I started knocking on them.
Gertrude B. Elion

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Carl Sagan

It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov

We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.
Steven Hawking

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.
Mae Jemison

Our faith in the present dies out long before out faith in the future.
Ruth Benedict

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?
Siddhartha Mukherjee

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.
Louis Pasteur

Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the Universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?
Neil deGrasse Tyson

We have nowhere else to go…this is all we have.
Margaret Mead

God created two acts of folly. First, He created the Universe in a Big Bag. Second, He was negligent enough to leave behind evidence for this act, in the form of microwave radiation.
Paul Edros

Beta decay was…like a dear old friend. There would always be a special place in my heart reserved especially for it.
Chien-Shiung Wu

Did the genome of our cave-dwelling predecessors contain a set or sets of genes which enable modern man to compose music of infinite complexity and write novels with profound meaning? …It looks as though the early Homo was already provided with the intellectual potential which was in great excess of what was needed to cope with the environment of his time.”
Susumu Ohno

It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.
Marie Currie

You stop planetary exploration, those people who do that extraordinary work are going to have to go do something else.
Bill Nye

It’s been proven by quite a few studies that plants are good for our psychological development. If you green an area, the rate of crime goes down. Torture victims begin to recover when they spend time outside in a garden with flowers. So we need them, in some deep psychological sense, which I don’t suppose anybody really understands yet.
Jane Goodall

Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.
Johannes Kepler

You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.
Rosalind Franklin

Home is where I work, and I work everywhere.
Alfred Nobel

Bonus. I couldn’t choose which Jane Goodall quote to use so Ill share both!

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.
Jane Goodall

Do any of these quotes give you a story idea? Share in the comments.