Physiologist Quotes

Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.

Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke

Music stands in a much closer connection with pure sensation than any of the other arts.

Hermann von Helmholtz

I am very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious.

The absorption of oxygen and the elimination of carbon dioxide in the lungs take place by diffusion alone. There is no trustworthy evidence of any regulation of this process on the part of the organism.

It is not accidental that all phenomena of human life are dominated by the search for daily bread — the oldest link connecting all living things, man included, with the surrounding nature.

More than one way for doing the same thing is provided by the natural constitution of the nervous system. This luxury of means of compassing a given combination seems to offer the means of restitution of an act after its impairment or loss in one of its several forms.

Charles Scott Sherrington

Those whose lives are so filled with the romance of discovery, whose years are a holiday of exploration, do not need, do not deserve, payment for their toil. Their work itself is adequate reward, they have more happiness already than their share...

A vital phenomenon can only be regarded as explained if it has been proven that it appears as the result of the material components of living organisms interacting according to the laws which those same components follow in their interactions outside of living systems.

Adolf Eugen Fick

Research in neurophysiology is much more like paddling a small canoe on a mountain river. The river which is fed by many distant springs carries you along all right, though often in a peculiar direction. You have to paddle quite hard to keep afloat. And sooner or later some of your ideas are upset and are carried downstream like an upturned canoe.

Alan Lloyd Hodgkin

Scientific physiology has the task of determining the functions of the animal body and deriving them as a necessary consequence from its elementary conditions.

Those who think 'Science is Measurement' should search Darwin's works for numbers and equations.

Unless social sciences can be as creative as natural science, our new tools are not likely to be of much use to us.

It is not given to man to alter the cosmic phenomena of the whole universe nor even those of the earth; but the advances of science enable him to alter the phenomena within his reach.

Every one is fond of comparing himself to something great and grandiose, as Louis XIV likened himself to the sun, and others have had like similes. I am more humble. I am a mere street scavenger (chiffonier) of science. With my hook in my hand and my basket on my back, I go about the streets of science, collecting what I find.

François Magendie

The fate of the physiology of the brain is independent of the truth and falsity of my assertions relative to the laws of the organization of the nervous system, in general, and of the brain in particular, just as the knowledge of the functions of a sense is independent of the knowledge of the structure of its apparatus.

Franz Joseph Gall

We have in the spinal cord the antetype (Vorbild) and the foundation for the entire structure of the brain.

Friedrich Arnold

An induction shock results in a contraction or fails to do so according to its strength; if it does so at all, it produces in the muscle at that time the maximal contraction that can result from stimuli of any strength.

Henry Pickering Bowditch

A scientist is one who, when he does not know the answer, is rigorously disciplined to speak up and say so unashamedly; which is the essential feature by which modern science is distinguished from primitive superstition, which knew all the answers except how to say, "I do not know."

All psychical acts without exception, if they are not complicated by elements of emotion... develop by way of reflex. Hence, all conscious movements resulting from these acts and usually described as voluntary, are reflex movements in the strict sense of the term.

Nothing indicates, however, at present that the artificial production of living matter is beyond the possibilities of science...

I praise my bountiful God, who hath called me into the Art of the fire, out of the dregs of other professions. For truly Chymistry... prepares the understanding to pierce the secrets of nature, and causeth a further searching out in nature, than all other Sciences being put together: and it pierceth even unto the utmost of real truth.

Jan Baptist van Helmont

Observation is simple, indefatigable, industrious, upright, without any preconceived opinion. Experiment is artificial, impatient, busy, digressive, passionate, unreliable.

Johannes Peter Müller

Those who have occasion to enter into the depths of what is oddly, if generously, called the literature of a scientific subject, alone know the difficulty of emerging with an unsoured disposition.

John Newport Langley

One of the characteristics of scientists and their work, curiously enough, is a certain confusion, almost a muddle. This may seem strange if you have come to think of science with a big S as being all clearness and light.

John Zachary Young