William Kingdon Clifford Short Quotes

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The republic of science, which allows no masters, but proved comrades only.

William Kingdon Clifford
To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.

William Kingdon Clifford
Force is not a fact at all, but and idea embodying what is approximately the fact.

William Kingdon Clifford
If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.

William Kingdon Clifford
No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

William Kingdon Clifford
For geometry, you know, is the gate of science, and the gate is so low and small that we can only enter it as a little child.

William Kingdon Clifford
We may always depend upon it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.

William Kingdon Clifford
The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

William Kingdon Clifford
When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.

William Kingdon Clifford
A man of science... explains as much as ever he can, and then he says, "This is all I can do; for the rest you must ask the next man."

William Kingdon Clifford
Thought is powerless, except it make something outside of itself: the thought which conquers the world is not contemplative but active.

William Kingdon Clifford
He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.

William Kingdon Clifford
The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.

William Kingdon Clifford
Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.

William Kingdon Clifford
This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.

William Kingdon Clifford
We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.

William Kingdon Clifford
I am endeavouring in a general way to explain the laws of double refraction on this hypothesis, but have not yet arrived at any results sufficiently decisive to be communicated.

William Kingdon Clifford
An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.

William Kingdon Clifford