Claude Bernard Quotes

82 quotes in 1102 categories

• It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.
• Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat,…
• The investigator should have a robust faith - and yet not believe.
• A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.
• Science does not permit exceptions.
• In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective…
• In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.
• Man does not limit himself to seeing; he thinks and insists on learning the meaning of phenomena whose existence has been revealed to him by…
• Obervation is a passive science, experimentation is an active science.
• We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.
• It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question…
• Even mistaken hypotheses and theories are of use in leading to discoveries. This remark is true in all the sciences. The alchemists founded chemistry by…
• Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to…
• Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex…
• The first entirely vital action, so termed because it is not effected outside the influence of life, consists in the creation of the glycogenic material…
• We achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.
• A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself; science is…
• First causes are outside the realm of science.
• To be worthy of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental…
• The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the…

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