John Herschel Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Of the splendid constellation of great names... we admire the living and revere dead far too warmly and too deeply to suffer us sit in judgment on their respective claims to in this or that particular discovery; to balance mathematical skill of one against the experimental dexterity of another, or the philosophical acumen a third. So long as "one star differs from another in glory,"—so long as there shall exist varieties, or even incompatibilities of excellence,—so long will the admiration of mankind be found sufficient for all who merit it.

John Herschel
To ascend to the origin of things and speculate on the creation, is not the business of the natural philosopher. An humbler field is sufficient for him in the endeavor to discover, as far as our faculties will permit; what are these primary qualities impressed on matter, and to discover the spirit of the laws of nature

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
Nature builds up by her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty which we are never weary of admiring.

John Herschel
As civilization extends, wants and desires of a higher order than material gratifications arise; and among them that of extending knowledge for the sake of knowing the craving after a larger grasp, a clearer insight, a more complete conception in all its relations of the wondrous universe of which we form a part.

John Herschel
According to this view of the matter, there is nothing casual in the formation of Metamorphic Rocks. All strata, once buried deep enough, (and due TIME allowed!!!) must assume that state,—none can escape. All records of former worlds must ultimately perish.

John Herschel
A mind which has once imbibed a taste for scientific enquiry, and has learnt the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur, has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.

John Herschel
If proof were wanted of the inexhaustible fertility of astronomical science in points of novelty and interest, it would suffice to adduce the addition to the list of members of our system of no less than eight new planets and satellites during the preparation of these sheets for the press.

John Herschel
The sparks of information from time to time struck out, instead of glimmering for a moment, and dying away in oblivion, began to accumulate into a genial glow, and the flame was at length kindled which was speedily to acquire the strength and rapid spread of a conflagration.

John Herschel
The colours which glitter on a soap-bubble are the immediate consequence of a principle the most important from the variety of phenomena it explains, and the most beautiful, from its simplicity and compendious neatness, in the whole science of optics.

John Herschel
Experience has been declared, with equal truth and poetry, to adopt occasionally the tone, and attain to something like the certainty, of Prophecy. In the contemplating mind the past and the future are linked by a bond as indissoluble as that which connects them in their actual sequence.

John Herschel
Every student who enters upon a scientific pursuit, especially if at a somewhat advanced period of life, will find not only that he has much to learn, but much also to unlearn.

John Herschel
Everyone knows that a volcano is a mountain that vomits out fire, and smoke, and cinders, and melted lava, and sulphur, and steam, and gases, and all kinds of horrible things...

John Herschel
The stars are the land-marks of the universe...

John Herschel
If matter exists in the universe for the purpose of life, nature would seem to tip a hogshead to fill a wineglass, when it makes life possible only on a little planet.

John Herschel
Time! Time! Time! — we must not impugn the Scripture Chronology, but we must interpret it in accordance with whatever shall appear on fair enquiry to be the truth for there cannot be two truths. And really there is scope enough: for the lives of the Patriarchs may as reasonably be extended to 5000 or 50000 years apiece as the days of Creation to as many thousand millions of years.

John Herschel
Geology, in the magnitude and sublimity of the objects of which it treats, undoubtedly ranks, in the scale of the sciences, next to astronomy.

John Herschel
A clever man, shut up alone and allowed unlimited time, might reason out for himself all the truths of mathematics, by proceeding from those simple notions of space and number of which he cannot divest himself without ceasing to think.

John Herschel
Giant Size and Giant Strength are ugly qualities without beneficence. But the sun is the almoner of the Almighty, the delegated dispenser to us of light and warmth, as well as the centre of attraction; and as such the immediate source of all our comforts, and indeed of the very possibility of our existence on earth.

John Herschel
It happens that great masses of knowledge are daily perishing before our eyes without the possibility of recovery, because, in fact, our eyes are not open to them, and we have nothing to awaken our attention to their transient display.

John Herschel
Almost all the greatest discoveries in astronomy have resulted from what we have elsewhere termed Residual Phenomena, of a qualitative or numerical kind, of such portions of the numerical or quantitative results of observation as remain outstanding and unaccounted for, after subducting and allowing for all that would result from the strict application of known principles.

John Herschel
Man is constituted as a speculative being; he contemplates the world, and the objects around him, not with a passive indifferent eye, but as a system disposed with order and design.

John Herschel
Man is a speculative as well as a sentient being, searching in everything for connexion and harmony, the perception of which mixes itself with his choicest pleasures.

John Herschel
By far the most wonderful and mysterious bodies of our system are the comets. Their number is immense, their variety of aspect infinite, their magnitude astounding.

John Herschel
I know not how to describe it [the great nebula in the constellation of Orion] better than by comparing it with a curdling liquid, or a surface strewed over with flocks of wool, or to the breaking up of a mackerel sky,, when the clouds of which it consists begin to assume a cirrus appearance.

John Herschel