John Tyndall - Man Quotes

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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
We can trace the development of a nervous system, and correlate with it the parallel phenomena of sensation and thought. We see with undoubting certainty that they go hand in hand. But we try to soar in a vacuum the moment we seek to comprehend the connexion between them...Man the object is separated by an impassable gulf from man the subject.

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
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
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
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
Man never has been and he never will be satisfied with the operations and products of the understanding alone; hence physical science cannot cover all the demands of his nature.

John Tyndall
In his efforts to cross the common bourne of the known and the unknown, the effective force of the man of science must depend, to a great extent, upon his acquired knowledge.

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
Between the mind of man and the outer world are interposed the nerves of the human body, which translate, or enable the mind to translate, the impressions of that world into facts of consciousness and thought.

John Tyndall