Ernst Mach Quotes

105 Sourced Quotes

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

Ernst Mach
Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

Ernst Mach
The object of natural science is the connection of phenomena; but the theories are like dry leaves which fall away when they have long ceased to be the lungs of the tree of science.

Ernst Mach
Physical science makes no investigation at all into things that are absolutely inaccessible to exact investigation, or as yet inaccessible to it.

Ernst Mach
The belief in occult magic powers of nature has gradually died away, but in its place a new belief has arisen, the belief in the magical power of science.

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
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
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
Ideas are not all of life. They are only momentary efflorescences of light, designed to illuminate the paths of the will.

Ernst Mach
Physics shares with mathematics the advantages of succinct description and of brief, compendious definition, which precludes confusion, even in ideas where, with no apparent burdening of the brain, hosts of others are contained.

Ernst Mach
Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

Ernst Mach
Only when Truth is in exceptionally good spirits does she bestow upon her wooer a glance of encouragement. For, thinks Truth, if I do not do something, in the end the fellow will not seek me at all.

Ernst Mach
Without its associated thought a word remains a mere sound.

Ernst Mach
Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Ernst Mach
All science has its origin in the needs of life.

Ernst Mach