William Huggins Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

A theory founded on truth, and formed according to the proper rules of science, can ever suffer from a strict examination, by which it would be but the more and more confirmed.

William Huggins
Surely in no part of Nature are the noblest and most profound conceptions of the human spirit more directly called forth than in the study of the heavens and the host thereof.

William Huggins
We, who form part of the emblazonry, can only see the design distorted and confused; here crowded, there scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those which are real.

William Huggins
This creative use of the imagination is not only the fountain of all inspiration in poetry and art, but is also the source of discovery in science, and indeed supplies the initial impulse to all development and progress. It is this creative power of the imagination which has inspired and guided all the great discoveries in science.

William Huggins
The heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars. The brighter stars cluster into well-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of streams and convoluted windings and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which becomes richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky Way.

William Huggins
One important object of this original spectroscopic investigation of the light of the stars and other celestial bodies, namely to discover whether the same chemical elements as those of our earth are present throughout the universe, was most satisfactorily settled in the affirmative.

William Huggins
This news was to me like the coming upon a spring of water in a dry and thirsty land. Here at last presented itself the very order of work for which in an indefinite way I was looking - namely, to extend his novel methods of research upon the sun to the other heavenly bodies.

William Huggins
A feeling as of inspiration seized me: I felt as if I had it now in my power to lift a veil which had never before been lifted; as if a key had been put into my hands which would unlock a door which had been regarded as forever closed to man - the veil and door behind which lay the unknown mystery of the true nature of the heavenly bodies.

William Huggins
But when, in framing a theory of the earth, a geologist shall indulge his fancy in framing, without evidence, that which had preceded the present order of things, he then either misleads himself, or writes a fable for the amusement of his reader.

William Huggins
From individual minds are born all great discoveries and revolutions of thought. New ideas may be in the air, and more or less present in many minds, but it is always an individual who at the last takes the creative step and enriches mankind with the living germ — thought of a new era of opinion.

William Huggins
A theory which sweeps the astronomical horizon of so many mysteries must not only arouse our profound interest, but claim the respectful consideration of men of science.

William Huggins
One of the great charms of the study of Nature lies in the circumstance that no new advance, however small, is ever final. There are no blind alleys in scientific investigation. Every new fact is the opening of a new path.

William Huggins
So far as a theory is formed in the generalization of natural appearances, that theory must be just, although it may not be perfect, as having comprehended every appearance; that is to say, a theory is not perfect until it be founded upon every natural appearance; in which case, those appearances will be explained by the theory.

William Huggins