Ernst Mach Quotes

34 quotes in 605 categories

• Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.
• Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before…
• It would not become physical science to see in its self created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena... The atom must remain…
• I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.
• A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon…
• In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that…
• Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.
• The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as…
• Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.
• The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him…
• The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses;…
• Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.
• Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole…
• To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as…
• Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.
• If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.
• When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for…
• Everyone is free to set up an opinion and to adduce proofs in support of it. Whether, though, a scientist shall find it worth his…
• The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the…
• A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed…

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