John Tyndall Quotes

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The ancients supposed light to be produced and vision excited by something emitted from the eye. The moderns hold vision to be excited by something that strikes the eye from without. What that something is we shall consider more closely subsequently.

John Tyndall
There is in the human intellect a power of expansion - I might almost call it a power of creation - which is brought into play by the simple brooding upon facts.

John Tyndall
We cannot quench [the] desires of the intellect. They are stimulated by the phenomena which surround us in our present state of existence as the body is by oxygen; and in the presence of these phenomena man thirsts for knowledge as an Arab longs for water when he smells the Nile. In Royal Institute of Great Britain

John Tyndall
I allude to Mr. Charles Darwin, the Abrabam of scientific men—a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God.

John Tyndall
I claim for the study of Physics the recognition that it answers to an impulse implanted by nature in the human constitution, and he who would oppose such study must be prepared to exhibit the credentials which authorize him to contravene Nature's manifest designs.

John Tyndall
Whether the other fixed stars have similar planetary companions or not is to us a matter of pure conjecture, which may or may not enter into our conception of the universe. But, probably, every thoughtful person believes, with regard to those distant suns, that there is in space something besides our system on which they shine.

John Tyndall
The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence.

John Tyndall
The first experiment a child makes is a physical experiment: the suction-pump is but an imitation of the first act of every new-born infant.

John Tyndall
The scientific mind can find no repose in the mere registration of sequence in nature. The further question intrudes itself with resistless might, Whence comes the sequence?

John Tyndall
Half of our book writers describe experiments which they never made, and their descriptions often lack both force and truth; but, no matter how clever or conscientious they may be, their written words cannot supply the place of actual observation.

John Tyndall
Observation tends to chasten the emotions and to check those structural efforts of the intellect which have emotion for their base.

John Tyndall
One of the most important functions of physical science, considered as a discipline of the mind, is to enable us by means of the tangible processes of Nature to apprehend the intangible.

John Tyndall
I have... tried to show [how physicists] pass from the world of the senses to a world where vision becomes spiritual, where principles are [formed], and from which the explorer emerges with [concepts] to be approved or rejected as they coincide] with sensible things.

John Tyndall
When the student of physical science has to investigate the character of any natural force, his first care must be to purify it from the mixture of other forces, and thus study its simple action.

John Tyndall
Extraordinary effects are produced by the accumulation of small impulses.

John Tyndall
Presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalizations of modern science constitute a poem more sublime than has ever yet addressed the human imagination.

John Tyndall
We have been scourged by invisible throngs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only today that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes.

John Tyndall
To the eye of science these ice-crystals are as precious as the diamond - as purely formed, as delicately built. Where no disturbing causes intervene, there is no disorder in this crystalline architecture. By their own constructive power molecule builds itself on to molecule with a precision far greater than that attainable by the hands of man.

John Tyndall
A favorite theory - the desire to establish or avoid a certain result - can so warp the mind as to destroy its power of estimating facts.

John Tyndall
Scientific theories sometimes float like rumours in the air before they receive complete expression.

John Tyndall
It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.

John Tyndall
[Faraday's] third great discovery is the Magnetization of Light, which I should liken to the Weisshorn among mountains—high, beautiful, and alone.

John Tyndall
There is no discovery so limited as not to illustrate something beyond itself.

John Tyndall
Facts looked at directly are vital; when they pass into words half the sap is taken out of them.

John Tyndall
Every star declares by its light its undamaged individuality, as if it alone had sent its thrill through space.

John Tyndall