Ernst Mach - Man Quotes

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The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Ernst Mach
Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The first and oldest words are names for "things". … The sensations are no "symbols of things". On the contrary the "thing" is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.

Ernst Mach
The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

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
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
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
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
Science is communicated by instruction, in order that one man may profit by the experience of another and be spared the trouble of accumulating it for himself; and thus, to spare posterity, the experiences of whole generations are stored up in libraries.

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

Ernst Mach