Claude Bernard - Science Quotes

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Observation is a passive science, experimentation an active science.

Claude Bernard
Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and their sole happiness…. A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.

Claude Bernard
Science has just the privilege of teaching us what we do not know, by replacing feeling with reason and experience and clearly showing us the present boundaries of our knowledge.

Claude Bernard
The goal of scientific physicians in their own science... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.

Claude Bernard
The application of mathematics to natural phenomena is the aim of all science.

Claude Bernard
Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science.

Claude Bernard
All those who restrict themselves to speaking of experimentation from the fireside do nothing for science; rather they harm it.

Claude Bernard
General physiology is the basic biological science toward which all others converge.

Claude Bernard
In my opinion the true scientific spirit is that whose high aspiration fertilize the sciences and draw them on in search of truths which are still beyond them but which must not be suppressed, because they have been attacked by stronger and more delicate philosophic minds.

Claude Bernard
If we mean to build up the biological sciences, and to study fruitfully the complex phenomena which occur in living beings, whether in the physiological or the pathological state, we must first of all lay down principles of experimentation, and then apply them to physiology, pathology and therapeutics.

Claude Bernard
In the sciences there is doubtless a very close connection between observation and experimentation. Nevertheless it is necessary to distinguish them because everything would become confused.

Claude Bernard
True science suppresses nothing, but goes on searching and is undisturbed in looking straight at things that it does not yet understand.

Claude Bernard
Science does not grow successively and regularly. It goes by bounds and revolutions. It is the changes in theories that mark the bounds. Science is revolutionary.

Claude Bernard
Good methods can teach us to develop and use to better purpose the faculties with which nature has endowed us, while poor methods may prevent us from turning them to good account. Thus the genius of inventiveness, so precious in the sciences, may be diminished or even smothered by a poor method, while a good method may increase and develop it.

Claude Bernard
A modern poet has characterized the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I: Science is We.

Claude Bernard
Men of science must not halt on the road; they must climb ever higher and strive toward perfection; they must always seek as long as they see anything to be found.

Claude Bernard
The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.

Claude Bernard
If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation.

Claude Bernard
Experimentation is undeniably harder in medicine than in any other science; but for that very reason, it was never so necessary, and indeed so indispensable.

Claude Bernard
Real science exists, then, only from the moment when a phenomenon is accurately defined as to its nature and rigorously determined in relation to its material conditions, that is, when its law is known. Before that, we have only groping and empiricism.

Claude Bernard
By a marvellous compensation, science, in humbling our pride, proportionately increases our power.

Claude Bernard
A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.

Claude Bernard
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 ourselves'.

Claude Bernard
True science teaches us to doubt and to abstain from ignorance.

Claude Bernard
In a word, I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis.

Claude Bernard