Physiologist Quotes

Ivan Pavlov

Wilhelm Wundt

Hermann von Helmholtz

Claude Bernard

Albrecht von Haller

Charles Richet

Charles Scott Sherrington

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

If a pair of electrodes (zinc covered by chamois leather and moistened with brine) are strapped to the front and back of the chest, and connected with a Lippmann's capillary electrometer, the mercury in the latter will be seen to move slightly but sharply at each beat of the heart.... The electrical variation precedes the heart's beat.

Augustus Desiré Waller

To say that physiology is made up of the physics of animals is to give a very inaccurate idea of it; as well might we say that astronomy is the physiology of the stars.

Marie François Xavier Bichat

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

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

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

Johannes Peter Müller

I am fully convinced that medical research can offer one a happy and productive life. And if one has a little Viking spirit he can explore the world and people as no one else can do. The whole medical research area is wide open for exploration.

Earl Wilbur Sutherland Jr.

Phylaxis, a word seldom used, stands in the Greek for protection. Anaphylaxis will thus stand for the opposite. Anaphylaxis, from its Greek etymological source, therefore means that state of an organism in which it is rendered hypersensitive, instead of being protected.

There are two kinds of scientists — The "gee whiz" kind and the "so what" kind. Flies around the urine cause the first type to exclaim: "Gee whiz, what could that mean?" whereas the other says: "so what, let's clean up this mess and get on with a proper experiment."

Charles Brenton Huggins

Without hypothesis there can be no progress in knowledge.

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

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

Friedrich Arnold

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

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.

But, as Bacon has well pointed out, truth is more likely to come out of error, if this is clear and definite, than out of confusion, and my experience teaches me that it is better to hold a well-understood and intelligible opinion, even if it should turn out to be wrong, than to be content with a muddle-headed mixture of conflicting views, sometimes miscalled impartiality, and often no better than no opinion at all.

William Bayliss

If but little thought be effected, yet to design more, can do us no harm: For although a Man shall never be able to hit Stars by shooting at them; yet he shall come much nearer to them than another that throws at Apples.

If I set out to prove something, I am no real scientist — I have to learn to follow where the facts lead me — I have to learn to whip my prejudices.

Lazzaro Spallanzani

The man of science who is not a doubter has no claim to honorable standing. He who doubts not is dead to science.

Frederic Schiller Lee

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

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

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...

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

But he was also a man with great personal magnetism and considerable charm. ['The goal of this presentation', he confided to me before a 12 minute talk describing our work, 'is to impress, rather than inform.'] There were those who misjudged all of this as arrogance.

W. A. H. Rushton

Statistics manufacture certainty out of random events, just as they ensure the profits of Monte Carlo, provided the roulette wheels run truly.

Karl Gotthelf Lehmann

A symbol, however, should be something more than a convenient and compendious expression of facts. It is, in the strictest sense, an instrument for the discovery of facts, and is of value mainly with reference to this end, by its adaptation to which it is to be judged.

Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet