Humphry Davy Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

In the present state of our knowledge, it would be useless to attempt to speculate on the remote cause of the electrical energy... its relation to chemical affinity is, however, sufficiently evident. May it not be identical with it, and an essential property of matter?

Humphry Davy
The wealth and prosperity of the country are only the comeliness of the body, the fullness of the flesh and fat; but the spirit is independent of them; it requires only muscle, bone and nerve for the true exercise of its functions. We cannot lose our liberty, because we cannot cease to think.

Humphry Davy
The more the phenomena of the universe are studied, the more distinct their connection appears, the more simple their causes, the more magnificent their design, and the more wonderful the wisdom and power of their author.

Humphry Davy
There is now before us a boundless prospect of novelty in science; a country unexplored, but noble and fertile in aspect; a land of promise in philosophy.

Humphry Davy
Doubt in physical research is highly salutary, and is always the parent of inquiry, and often of truth.

Humphry Davy
Insulated, striking, but unexplained facts in science, are to the philosopher what green branches and fruits in the ocean are to the mariner voyaging for discovery; they are omens of land, which, even though he himself should not have the felicity of attaining, he may yet indicate to others.

Humphry Davy
A man should be proud of his honours, not vain of them.

Humphry Davy
It is needless for us again to say that in science and the arts there is a dependence which is the source of their progression and importance. In a well organized country, power is always compound: Archimedes could not have made machines which terrified the Roman soldiers without the assistance of good carpenters and good workers in metal.

Humphry Davy
Consistency in regard to opinions is the slow poison of the intellectual life, the destroyer of its vividness and its energy.

Humphry Davy
By accustoming the mind to strict reasoning, and minute observation as to matters of fact, the judgment is strengthened, and rendered more acute and distinct in its application to common affairs. Unhealthy sensibilities are destroyed, and the imagination refined and exalted.

Humphry Davy
If I am allowed to give a metaphorical allusion to the future state of the blessed, I should imagine it by the orange-grove in that sheltered glen on which the sun is now beginning to shine, and of which the trees are at the same time, loaded with sweet golden fruit and balmy silver flowers. Such objects may well portray a state in which hope and fruition become one eternal feeling.

Humphry Davy
The three states of the caterpillar, larva, and butterfly have, since the time of the Greek poets, been applied to typify the human being,--its terrestrial form, apparent death, and ultimate celestial destination.

Humphry Davy
The future is composed merely of images of the past, connected in new arrangements by analogy, and modified by the circumstances and feelings of the moment...

Humphry Davy
The substitution of analogy for fact is the bane of chemical philosophy; the legitimate use of analogy is to connect facts together and to guide to new experiments.

Humphry Davy
It may be said of modern chemistry, that its beginning is pleasure, its progress knowledge and its object truth and utility.

Humphry Davy
Astronomy is the most ancient, and the nearest approaching to perfection, of the sciences; yet, relating to the immensity of the universe, how unbounded are the objects of inquiry it presents! And, amongst them, how many grand and abstruse subjects of investigation !

Humphry Davy
Science for its progression requires patronage, - but it must be a patronage bestowed, a patronage received, with dignity. It must be preserved independent. It can bear no fetters, not even fetters of gold, and least of all those fetters in which ignorance or selfishness may attempt to shackle it.

Humphry Davy
Science is in fact nothing more than the refinement of common sense making use of facts already known to acquire new facts.

Humphry Davy
Profound minds are the most likely to think lightly of the resources of human reason, and it is the superficial thinker who is generally strongest in every kind of unbelief.

Humphry Davy
The greatest use of practical science is discovery.

Humphry Davy
A well-constructed theory must explain some of what is not understood, predict previously unknown phenomena, and, to be successful, have its predictions consistently confirmed. Furthermore, skeptics should not hesitate to question every possible assumption, no matter how basic.

Humphry Davy
Experience must be our guide ; experience, or moral feeling, founded on accurate and distinct knowledge.

Humphry Davy
Simplicity and precision ought to be the characteristics of a scientific nomenclature: words should signify things, or the analogies of things, and not opinions.

Humphry Davy
At no very distant period the whole science [chemistry] will be capable of elucidation by mathematical principles.

Humphry Davy
Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophical mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery.

Humphry Davy
All human knowledge is necessarily imperfect; but the further it extends, the better are its effects.

Humphry Davy
We have found a beautiful and most general proposition, namely, that every integer is either a square, or the sum of two, three or at most four squares. This theorem depends on some of the most recondite mysteries of number, and is not possible to present its proof on the margin of this page.

Humphry Davy
One use of physical science is that it gives definite ideas.

Humphry Davy
I hardly know which we ought most to rejoice at - the progress that has been made in natural knowledge, or the progress that is to be made.

Humphry Davy
The maxim of a chemical investigator should be that adopted in the motto of an illustrious society, ' To rely on the word of no master.'

Humphry Davy