Ernst Mach Quotes

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Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach
Theories are abstractions, which, while placing in relief what is important in certain determinate cases, neglect almost necessarily, or even disguise, what is important in other cases.

Ernst Mach
Natural laws may be likened to intellectual type of a higher order, partly movable, partly stereotyped, which last on new editions of experience may become downright impediments.

Ernst Mach
However far the telescope... may penetrate, what it would disclose to us would always be the same island, the same bubble, even when it touches the ultimate spiral nebulae; and this island or this bubble of which the surface is millions or billions of light years, is only a point in the ocean of the All.

Ernst Mach
One can never lose one's footing, or come into collision with facts, if one always keeps in view the path by which one has come.

Ernst Mach
I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.

Ernst Mach
Physical science began in the witch's kitchen. It now embraces the organic and inorganic worlds, and with the physiology of articulation and the theory of the senses, has even pushed its researches, at times impertinently, into the province of mental phenomena.

Ernst Mach
The student of the theory of knowledge, like the geologist and the astronomer, must be permitted to reason back from the forms which are created before his eyes to others which he finds ready made for him.

Ernst Mach
Truth suffers herself to be won. She flirts at times disgracefully. Above all, she is determined to be merited, and has naught but contempt for the man who will win her too quickly.

Ernst Mach
Nature acts in the construction of liquid figures on the principle of a covetous tailor, and gives no thought in her work to the fashions. But, strange to say, in this work, the most beautiful fashions are of themselves produced.

Ernst Mach
Experiments are never absolutely exact, but they at least may lead the inquiring mind to conjecture that... key which will clear up the connection of all the facts.

Ernst Mach
It is a peculiar property of instinctive knowledge that it is predominantly of a negative nature. We cannot so well say what must happen as we can what cannot happen, since the latter alone stands in glaring contrast to the obscure mass of experience in us in which single characters are not distinguished.

Ernst Mach
Generally speaking, anything that is constructed according to fixed and logically followed rules, is a product of tolerable beauty.

Ernst Mach
If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

Ernst Mach
Everything which we observe in nature imprints itself uncomprehended and unanalyzed in our percepts and ideas which then, in their turn, mimic the processes of nature in their most general and most striking features.

Ernst Mach
When the human mind, with its limited powers, attempts to mirror in itself the rich life of the world, of which it is itself only a small part, and which it can never hope to exhaust, it has every reason for proceeding economically.

Ernst Mach
I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

Ernst Mach
Economy of communication and of apprehension is of the very essence of science. Herein lies its pacificatory, its enlightening, its refining element.

Ernst Mach
We are entitled to regard our knowledge of the decisive conditions of any phenomenon as sufficient only in the event that such conditions determine the phenomenon precisely and uniquely.

Ernst Mach
An incomplete knowledge put into words forms a relatively firm prop for fleeting thoughts, from which the thoughts, seeking among facts, set out, and to which, modifying it by criticism and comparison, they continually return.

Ernst Mach
That branch of physics which is at once the oldest and the simplest and which is therefore treated as introductory to other departments of this science, is concerned with the motions and equilibrium of masses. It bears the name of mechanics.

Ernst Mach
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 of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

Ernst Mach
In his unceasing desire to diminish the boundaries of the incomprehensible, man has always been engaged in attempts to understand death by life and life by death.

Ernst Mach
An ancient philosopher once remarked that people who cudgeled their brains about the nature of the moon reminded him of men who discussed the laws and institutions of a distant city of which they had heard no more than the name.

Ernst Mach
Every candid person will confess that there are many branches of knowledge about which he had better be silent.

Ernst Mach
Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

Ernst Mach
He who understands not only the letter but also the reason of the law will not be at a loss when confronted with cases to which the letter does not accurately apply.

Ernst Mach
For a long time the structure of the organ of hearing has actively engaged the attention of anatomists. A considerable number of brilliant discoveries has been brought to light by their labors, and a splendid array of facts and truths established. But with these facts a host of new enigmas has been presented.

Ernst Mach
Language, with its helpmate, conceptual thought, by fixing the essential and rejecting the unessential, constructs its rigid pictures of the fluid world on the plan of a mosaic, at a sacrifice of exactness and fidelity but with a saving of tools and labor.

Ernst Mach
He who knows only one view or one form of a view does not believe that another has ever stood in its place, or that another will ever succeed; he neither doubts nor tests.

Ernst Mach