47 quotes found
“The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”
“I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.”
“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.”
“For once reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal.”
“Act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done by hesitation.”
“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun ...”
“The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”
“What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.”
“With theology as a code of dogmas which are to be believed, or at any rate repeated, under penalty of present or future punishment, or as a storehouse of anaesthetics for those who find the pains o...”
“Wherever sufficiently numerous series of the remains of any given group, which has endured for a long space of time, are carefully examined, their morphological relations are never in discordance w...”
“From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, e...”
“It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and w...”
“The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History of Civilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increase of industrial production by the application of machinery, t...”
“In fact a favourite problem of [John Tyndall] isGiven the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet or Faust therefrom. He is confident that the Physics of the Future will solve this easily.”
“It appears now to be universally admitted that, before the exile, the Israelites had no belief in rewards and punishments after death, nor in anything similar to the Christian heaven and hell; but ...”
“Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate...”
“Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as o...”
“When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I...”
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ough...”
“Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the...”
“The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.”
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Romenot by favour of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachin...”
“But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows th...”
