William Whewell - Truth Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all William Whewell Quotes
Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.

William Whewell
We unfold out of the Idea of Space the propositions of geometry, which are plainly truths of the most rigorous necessity and universality. But if the idea of space were merely collected from observation of the external world, it could never enable or entitle us to assert such propositions: it could never authorize us to say that not merely some lines, but all lines, not only have, but must have, those properties which geometry teaches. Geometry in every proposition speaks a language which experience never dares to utter; and indeed of which she but half comprehends the meaning.

William Whewell
In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.

William Whewell
The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

William Whewell
In truth, we know causes only by their effects; and in order to learn the nature of the causes which modify the earth, we must study them through all ages of their action, and not select arbitrarily the period in which we live as the standard for all other epochs.

William Whewell
Advances in knowledge are not commonly made without the previous exercise of some boldness and license in guessing. The discovery of new truths requires, undoubtedly, minds careful and fertile in examining what is suggested; but it requires, no less, such as are quick and fertile in suggesting.

William Whewell
The earlier truths are not expelled but absorbed, not contradicted but extended; and the history of each science, which may thus appear like a succession of revolutions, is, in reality, a series of developements.

William Whewell
The framing of hypotheses is, for the inquirer after truth, not the end, but the beginning of his work.

William Whewell
We may best hope to understand the nature and conditions of real knowledge by studying the nature and conditions of the most certain and stable portions of knowledge which we already possess: and we are most likely to learn the best methods of discovering truth by examining how truths, now universally recognized, have really been discovered.

William Whewell
All who discover truths, must have reasoned upon many errours to obtain each truth.

William Whewell
[The law of gravitation] is indisputably and incomparably the greatest scientific discovery ever made, whether we look at the advance which it involved, the extent of truth disclosed, or the fundamental and satisfactory nature of this truth.

William Whewell
The truth of tentative hypotheses must be tested by their application to facts. The discoverer must be ready, carefully to try his hypotheses in this manner, and to reject them if they will not bear the test, in spite of indolence and vanity.

William Whewell
Experience can discover universal truths, though she cannot give them universality.

William Whewell