18th-century Scientist Quotes

Antoine Lavoisier

Humphry Davy

Alessandro Volta

John Dalton

Jöns Jacob Berzelius

Hans Christian Ørsted

Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac

Throughout this volume, we have felt considerable inconvenience, from the dogmatical classification of plants, and have all along been floundering between species and variety, which certainly under culture soften into each other.

Patrick Matthew

For you teach very clearly by your behaviour how slowly and how meagerly our senses proceed in the investigation of ever inexhaustible nature.

Giovanni Battista Beccaria

On graduating from the school, a studious young man who would withstand the tedium and monotony of his duties has no choice but to lose himself in some branch of science or literature completely irrelevant to his assignment.

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

The exterior form and the chemical composition are each other's image.

René Just Haüy

Added to this we already see numerous indications of a future, in which the chemical and mechanical laws of nature will be more intimately united. In short, the natural laws of chemistry, as well as those of mechanics, are laws of Reason, and both are so intimately connected, that they must be viewed as a unity of Reason.

Hans Christian Ørsted

The first thoughts, which gave rise to his Principia, he had, when he retired from Cambridge in 1666 on account of the plague. As he sat alone in a garden, he fell into a speculation on the power of gravity; that as this power is not found sensibly diminished at the remotest distance from the centre of the earth to which we can rise, neither at the tops of the loftiest buildings, nor even on the summits of the highest mountains, it appeared to him reasonable to conclude that this power must extend much further than was usually thought: why not as high as the moon? said he to himself.

Henry Pemberton

Man may almost with propriety be said to be a meteorologist by nature: he is naturally placed in such a state of dependence upon the elements, that to watch their vicissitudes and anticipate their disturbances, becomes a necessary portion of the labor to which he is born.

John Frederic Daniell

So great is the effect of cleanliness upon man, that it extends even to his moral character. Virtue never dwelt long with filth; nor do I believe there ever was a person scrupulously: attentive to cleanliness, who was a consummate villain.

Benjamin Thompson

As soon as you know a man to be blind, you imagine that you can see it from his back.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

It should ever be borne in mind that the primary object of every study ought to be an inward one that of enlarging and elevating the intellect; and the direct aim of science should be the discovery of the principles of unity, order, and connexion, which are everywhere manifest in the universal life of nature.

A traveler has a right to relate and embellish his adventures as he pleases, and it is very impolite to refuse that deference and applause they deserve.

Rudolf Erich Raspe

It will be found that everything depends on the composition of the forces with which the particles of matter act upon one another; and from these forces, as a matter of fact, all phenomena of Nature take their origin.

Roger Joseph Boscovich

As the Knowledge of Nature tends to enlarge the human Mind, and give us more noble, more grand, and exalted Ideas of the AUTHOR of Nature, and if well pursu'd, seldom fails producing something useful to Man.

Ebenezer Kinnersley

According to the common law of nature, deficiency of power is supplied by duration of time.

Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.

How pitiable is it to reflect, that although you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of Mankind, and of his equal and impartial distribution of these rights and privileges, which he hath conferred upon them, that you should at the same time counteract his mercies, in detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren, under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, which you professedly detested in others, with respect to yourselves

Benjamin Banneker

There are only individuals, and no kingdoms or classes or genera or species.

Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet

The first step to be taken, is to study carefully the fundamental phenomenon above described, and to examine all the various circumstances under which it presents itself.

Jean-Baptiste Biot

I. Animals have an electricity peculiar to themselves to which the name animal electricity is given.
II. The organs in which animal electricity acts above all others, and by which it is distributed throughout the whole body, are the nerves, and the most important organ of secretion is the brain.

Christian Heinrich Pfaff

Its surface resembled that of a sea which has become suddenly frozen — not during a tempest, but at the instant when the wind has subsided, and the waves, although very high, have become blunted and rounded.

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure

No arrangement can pretend to define and separate those objects which the hand of nature has neither defined nor separated.

John MacCulloch

To suppose that the Omnipotent God made a world, found it a failure, and broke it up, and then made it again, and again broke it up, as the Geologists say, is all fiddle faddle. Describing Species of birds and shells, & c., is all fiddle faddle.

Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope

I had come to the conclusion, that the principal alimentary matters might be reduced to the three great classes, namely the saccharine, the oily and the albuminous.

The nerves have been hitherto considered as chords that have no powers of contraction within themselves, but only serving as a medium, by means of which the influence of the brain may be communicated to the muscles, and the impressions made upon the different parts of the body conveyed to the brain.

Winds have ever been considered, with reason, as having a principal share in producing changes of weather, and therefore they demand a particular regard in meteorology.