John Herschel Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Natural History... is either the beginning or the end of physical science.

John Herschel
The great mystery, however, is to conceive how so enormous a conflagration [as the sun] can be kept up. Every discovery in chemical science here leaves us completely at a loss, or rather, seems to remove farther the prospect of probable explanation.

John Herschel
We stand on the verge of a vast cosmological discovery such as nothing hitherto imagined can compare with.

John Herschel
The constellations seem to have been almost purposely named and delineated to cause as much confusion and inconvenience as possible. Innumerable snakes twine through long and contorted areas of the heavens, where no memory can follow them; bears, lions and fishes, large and small, northern and southern, confuse all nomenclature.

John Herschel
A philosophical theory does not shoot up like the tall and spiry pine in graceful and unencumbered natural growth, but, like a column built by men, ascends amid extraneous apparatus and shapeless masses of materials.

John Herschel
Many of the operations of nature are carried on in her great laboratory which we cannot comprehend, but now and then we see some of the tools with which she is at work. [The many telescopic comets may restore to the sun what is lost by the emission of light.]

John Herschel
The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

John Herschel
Man is the undisputed lord of the creation. The strongest and fiercest of his fellow-creatures - the whale, the elephant, the eagle, and the tiger - are slaughtered by him to supply his most capricious wants, or tamed to do him service, or imprisoned to make him sport.

John Herschel
The Milky Way is like sand, not strewn evenly as with a sieve, but as if flung down by handfuls (and both hands at once), leaving dark spaces in between.

John Herschel
When we look through nature and observe the manifest indications of design which every point of it exhibits, it would be very presumptuous in us to assert that comets are of no use, and serve no purpose in our system.

John Herschel
Science is of no party. Under the government, whether of Whig or Tory, she has often had to complain of the difficulty of making herself heard in recommendation of her objects; but those objects once recognized by a British government, are taken up in a spirit and with a liberality which ensures success, if success be possible.

John Herschel
In whatever state of knowledge we may conceive man to be placed, his progress towards a yet higher state need never fear a check, but must continue till the last existence of society.

John Herschel
Seeing is in some respects an art which must be learnt. To make a person see with such a power is nearly the same as if I were asked to make him play one of Handel's fugues upon the organ. Many a night I have been practicing to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice.

John Herschel
He must have studied astronomy to little purpose, who can suppose man to be the only object of his Creator's care, or who does not see in the vast and wonderful apparatus around us provision for other races of animated beings.

John Herschel
Accustomed to trace the operation of general causes, and the exemplification of general laws, in circumstances where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty, [the scientist and natural philosopher] walks in the midst of wonders.

John Herschel
The probable error of the whole (0.0032) shews that the mean specific gravity of this our planet is, in all human probability, quite as well determined as that of an ordinary hand-specimen in a mineralogical cabinet - a marvellous result, which should teach us to despair of nothing which lies within the compass of number, weight, and measure.

John Herschel
Familiar objects and events are far from presenting themselves to our senses in that aspect and with those connections under which science requires them to be viewed, and which constitute their rational explanation.

John Herschel
This remarkable belt [Milky Way] has maintained, from the earliest ages, the same relative situation among the stars; and, when examined through powerful telescope, is found (wonderful to relate!) to consist entirely of stars scattered by millions, like glittering dust, on the black ground of the general heavens.

John Herschel
It can hardly be pressed forcibly enough on the attention of the student of nature, that there is scarcely any natural phenomenon which can be fully and completely explained, in all its circumstances, without a union of several, perhaps of all, the sciences.

John Herschel
Speculations apparently the most unprofitable have almost invariably been those from which the greatest practical applications have emanated.

John Herschel
No doubt the testimony of natural reason, on whatever exercised, must, of necessity, stop short of those truths which it is the object of revelation to make known; still it places the existence and personal attributes of the Deity on such grounds as to render doubts absurd and atheism ridiculous.

John Herschel
[Precision] is the very soul of science; and its attainment afford the only criterion, or at least the best, of the truth of theories, and the correctness of experiments.

John Herschel
Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and arranged, so as to become attainable by one.

John Herschel
The laws of nature are not only permanent, but consistent, intelligible, and discoverable with such a moderate degree of research, as is calculated rather to stimulate than to weary curiosity.

John Herschel
There is a gentle, but perfectly irresistible coercion in a habit of reading well directed, over the whole tenor of a man's character and conduct, which is not the less effectual because it works insensibly, and because it is really the last thing he dreams of.

John Herschel