John Tyndall Quotes

78 Sourced Quotes

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
If you speak to your fellowman, you are not entitled to use jargon. Bad experiments are jargon addressed to Nature, and just as much to be deprecated.

John Tyndall
We claim, and we shall wrest from theology, the entire domain of cosmological theory.

John Tyndall
It is by a kind of inspiration that we rise from the wise and sedulous contemplation of facts to the principles on which they depend.

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
Slowly, and with difficulty, the notion of natural forces took root in the human mind. Slowly, and with difficulty, the science of mechanics had to grow out of this notion; and slowly at last came the full application of mechanical principles to the motions of the heavenly bodies.

John Tyndall
Thus, having exhausted science and reached its very rim, the real mystery of existence still looms around us. And thus it will ever loom - ever beyond the bourne of man's intellect - giving the poets of successive ages just occasion to declare that, We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep.

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

John Tyndall
I do not think that it is the mission of this age, or of any other particular age, to lay down a system of education which shall hold good for all ages.

John Tyndall
All our notions of Nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have some foundation in experience.

John Tyndall
Bounded and conditioned by cooperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer.

John Tyndall
No human authority, however high, can maintain itself against the voice of Nature speaking through experiment. But the voice of Nature may be an uncertain voice, through the scantiness of data.

John Tyndall
Whether we see rightly or wrongly - whether our intellection be real or imaginary - it is of the utmost importance in science to aim at perfect clearness in the description of all that comes, or seems to come, within the range of the intellect.

John Tyndall
Between molecular mechanics and consciousness is interposed a fissure over which the ladder of physical reasoning is incompetent to carry us.

John Tyndall
We observe facts and store them up; imagination broods upon these memories, and by the aid of reason tries to discern their interdependence. The theoretic principle flashes, or slowly dawns upon the mind, and then the deductive faculty interposes to carry out the principle to its logical consequences.

John Tyndall
The aspects of Nature provoke in man the spirit of inquiry. As the eye is formed to see, and the ear to hear, so the human mind is formed to explore and understand the basis and relationship of natural phenomena.

John Tyndall
It is one of the disadvantages of reading books about natural scenery that they fill the mind with pictures, often exaggerated, often distorted, often blurred, and, even when well drawn, injurious to the freshness of first impressions.

John Tyndall
The energy of Nature is a constant quantity, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total, sacrificing one if he would produce another.

John Tyndall