Ernst Mach - Thought Quotes

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Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

Ernst Mach
The power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.

Ernst Mach
Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Ernst Mach
Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.

Ernst Mach
The question, "Why?" which is always appropriate where the explanation of a contradiction is concerned, like all proper habitudes of thought, can overreach itself and be asked where nothing remains to be understood.

Ernst Mach
It is characteristic of the naive and sanguine beginnings of thought in youthful men and nations, that all problems are held to be soluble and fundamentally intelligible on the first appearance of success.

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

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
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
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
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
Is science itself anything more than — a business? Is not its task to acquire with the least possible work, in the least possible time, with the least possible thoughts, the greatest possible part of eternal truth?

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
Without its associated thought a word remains a mere sound.

Ernst Mach