Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Practical, like abstract science, has no limits.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
The accumulation of facts is indispensable to the growth of science, a thousand facts are of less value to human progress than is a single one when it is scientifically comprehended, for it then becomes generalised in all similar cases.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Man gets so accustomed to luxurious applications of science, that he often forgets the searcher of abstract truth whose discoveries led to them.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Science is too lofty for measurement by the yard of utility; - too inestimable for expression by a money standard. These grovelling ideas of the objects of science, which constantly jar it in its intercourse with the world, ought to find no response in the breast of any devotee who would draw inspiration from its shrine.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
It is no mean task for intellect to leap over the barriers of ignorance; it is even more easy to go onward ill new and untrodden paths.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
There is no vein of science too abstract for future industrial application; none yet thoroughly mined out and exhausted.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Science may see an horizon bounding her view; but as she proceeds onward the horizon constantly recedes, and shows the limit to be altogether illusory. In one time and generation a nation may, like Newton, pick up a few pebbles on the seashore, while the boundless ocean of science lies beyond, with all its vast and unexplored treasures.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
The great discoveries of science leave behind them no boundary line of demarcation from those which have preceded, but, like the full day succeeding the dawning of the sun, follow that which fully foretold their approach.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Nothing is more erroneous in their case than to neglect the acquisition of abstract scientific truths because they appear remote from practice.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Isolated facts may be viewed as the dust of science. Inaugural Address

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
Science is truly catholic, and is bounded only by the universe.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair
The applications of science are not difficult, but without the science there are no applications.

Lyon Playfair, 1st Baron Playfair