Ernst Mach Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

The knowledge of the development of a science rests on the study of writings in their historical sequence and in their historical connection.

Ernst Mach
The sailor in whose phantasy objects swept up on the coast vividly provoke the picture of a far-off land will go to look for it. Whether he finds it or not, whether its location and character correspond with his idea or not, if instead of the surmised Indian or Chinese coast he discovers a new one, in any case he has widened his experience.

Ernst Mach
Science does not create facts from facts, but simply orders known facts.

Ernst Mach
In the infinite variety of nature many ordinary events occur; while others appear uncommon, perplexing, astonishing, or even contradictory to the ordinary run of things. As long as this is the case we do not possess a well-settled and unitary conception of nature.

Ernst Mach
The essential function of a hypothesis consists in the guidance it affords to new observations and experiments, by which our conjecture is either confirmed or refuted.

Ernst Mach
Knowledge which one does not possess one cannot use.

Ernst Mach
The communication of knowledge and the necessity which everyone feels of managing his stock of experience with the least expenditure of thought, compel us to put our knowledge in economical forms.

Ernst Mach
Not every physicist is an epistemologist, and not everyone must or can be one. Special investigation claims a whole man, so does the theory of knowledge.

Ernst Mach
The highest philosophy of the scientific investigator is precisely this toleration of an incomplete conception of the world and the preference for it rather than an apparently perfect, but inadequate conception.

Ernst Mach
No point of view has absolute, permanent validity. Each has importance only for some given end.

Ernst Mach
The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

Ernst Mach
The universe is like a machine in which the motion of certain parts is determined by that of others, only nothing is determined about the motion of the whole machine.

Ernst Mach
We err when we expect more enlightenment form an hypothesis than from the facts themselves.

Ernst Mach
If belief in the reality of atoms is so important to you, I cut myself off from the physicist's mode of thinking.

Ernst Mach
Every real problem can and will be solved in due course without supernatural divination, entirely by accurate observation and close, searching thought.

Ernst Mach
I only seek to adopt in physics a point of view that need not be changed the moment our glance is carried over into the domain of another science; for ultimately, all must form one whole.

Ernst Mach
As a rule, the human brain is too much, and wrongly, burdened with things which might be more conveniently and accurately preserved in books where they could be found at a moment's notice.

Ernst Mach
No man should dream of solving a great problem unless he is so thoroughly saturated with his subject that everything else sinks into comparative insignificance.

Ernst Mach
Properly speaking the world is not composed of "things" as its elements, but colors, tones, pressures, spaces, times, in short what we ordinarily call individual sensations.

Ernst Mach
My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Ernst Mach
Science throws her treasures, not like a capricious fairy into the laps of a favored few, but into the laps of all humanity, with a lavish extravagance that no legend ever dreamt of !

Ernst Mach
The grist and kernel of mechanical ideas has in almost every case grown up in the investigation of very simple and special cases of mechanical processes; and the analysis of the history of the discussions concerning these cases must ever remain the method at once the most effective and the most natural for laying this gist and kernel bare.

Ernst Mach
Let us not let go the guiding hand of history. History has made all; history can alter all.

Ernst Mach
Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

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