Humphry Davy - Mind Quotes

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Nature is beautiful, and you are in her bosom. That voice of comfort which speaks in the breezes of morning, may visit your mind, that the delightful influences which the green leaves, the blue sky, the moonbeams and clouds of the evening diffuse over the universe, may in their powers of soul-healing, visit your day visions, is my desire and hope.

Humphry Davy
Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion.

Humphry Davy
Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

Humphry Davy
I envy no quality of the mind or intellect in others; not genius, power, wit, nor fancy; but, if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing.

Humphry Davy
Gay-Lussac was quick, lively, ingenious and profound, with great activity of mind and great facility of manipulation. I should place him at the head of all the living chemists in France.

Humphry Davy
We cannot be too grateful for that wonderful constitution of the external universe, by which it is rendered an inexhaustible source of interest to the inexhaustible human mind.

Humphry Davy
The love of knowledge and of intellectual power is a faculty belonging to the human mind in every state of society; and it is one by which it is most justly characterized — one the most worthy of being cultivated and extended.

Humphry Davy
Human beings have been created for happiness, and a principal means of obtaining it is by the exercise of the intellectual faculties, by an exertion of reason and imagination, by imitating nature and modifying her operations. And knowledge is no less necessary to supply the wants of the mind than food is to support the functions of the body.

Humphry Davy
Time... which purifies, and as it were sanctifies the mind, destroys and brings into utter decay the body; and, even in nature, its influence seems always degrading. She is represented by the poets as eternal in her youth, but amongst these ruins she appears to me eternal in her age, and here no traces of renovation appear in the ancient of days.

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
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
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
By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed in the mind; by analogy, similar facts are connected ; by experiment, new facts are discovered ; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy, confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth.

Humphry Davy
The man of true genius, who studies science in consequence of its applications, pointing out to himself a definite end, will make use of all the instruments of investigation which are necessary for his purposes: and in the search of discovery, he will rather pursue the plans of his own mind than be limited by the artificial divisions of language.

Humphry Davy
No motive for exertion is so strong as that founded upon the sympathy of the good and the wise; no reward so sweet as that of being held up to public admiration as a benefactor of the species; no glory so pure, so calculated to awaken great minds, as that of immortality.

Humphry Davy