Claude Bernard - Science Quotes

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The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.

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
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
Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish 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
In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.

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

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
Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge. It is in the darker. It is in the darker regions of science that great men are recognized; they are marked by ideas which light up phenomena hitherto obscure and carry science forward.

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
I can no more accept a philosophy, then, which tries to assign boundaries to science, than a science which claims to suppress philosophic truths that are at present outside its own domain.

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