Humphry Davy - Nature Quotes

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Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature!
Have I not worshipped thee with such a love
As never mortal man before displayed?
Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation,
And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways
As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage?

Humphry Davy
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
Fortunately science, like that nature to which it belongs, is neither limited by time nor by space. It belongs to the world, and is of no country and of no age. The more we know, the more we feel our ignorance; the more we feel how much remains unknown; and in philosophy, the sentiment of the Macedonian hero can never apply, — there are always new worlds to conquer.

Humphry Davy
The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country.

Humphry Davy
The person who wishes to understand the higher departments of chemistry, or to pursue them in their most interesting relations to the economy of Nature, ought to be well-grounded in elementary mathematics; he will oftener have to refer to arithmetic than algebra, and to algebra than to geometry. But all these sciences lend their aid to chemistry.

Humphry Davy
Chemistry relates to those operations by which the intimate nature of bodies is changed, or by which they acquire new properties. This definition will not only apply to the effects of mixture, but to the phenomena of electricity, and in short to all the changes which do not merely depend upon the motion or division of masses of matter.

Humphry Davy
Knowledge can only be acquired by the senses: nature has no archetype in the human imagination; her empire is given only to industry and action, guided and governed by experience.

Humphry Davy
There will always be enigmas for us in nature as in philosophy, which will keep alive the faculty of research, and the active power of investigation. And it is much wiser to rejoice that something has been discovered, than to regret that so much is still concealed from us.

Humphry Davy
In this advanced age of the world there ought to be no question concerning the importance of natural knowledge, of discoveries of the powers of nature, and of the wise laws by which they are governed.

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
In natural science there is one language universally intelligible, — the language of facts; it belongs to nature, and it is permanent as the objects of nature; it is the same to the citizen of Paris and of London.

Humphry Davy
We can trace back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the progressiveness of our nature, and that this little earth is but a point from which we start toward a perfection of being.

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
Attraction, of whatever kind, tends, as it were, to produce rest - a sort of eternal sleep in Nature.

Humphry Davy