 The world is neither wise nor just, but it makes up for all its folly and injustice by being damnably sentimental. |
| Ecclesiasticism in science is only unfaithfulness to truth. |
| Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. |
| The child who has been taught to make an accurate elevation, plan, and section of a pint pot has had an admirable training in accuracy of eye and hand. |
| Time, whose tooth gnaws away everything else, is powerless against truth. |
| Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. |
| Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed. |
| Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact. |
| If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger? |
| The medieval university looked backwards; it professed to be a storehouse of old knowledge. The modern university looks forward, and is a factory of new knowledge. |
| Nothing can be more incorrect than the assumption one sometimes meets with, that physics has one method, chemistry another, and biology a third. |
| The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals. |
| Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth. |
| The more rapidly truth is spread among mankind the better it will be for them. Only let us be sure that it is the truth. |
| I protest that if some great Power would agree to make me always think what is true and do what is right, on condition of being turned into a sort of clock and would up every morning before I got out of bed, I should instantly close with the offer. |
| I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'. |
| In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact. |
| Surely there is a time to submit to guidance and a time to take one's own way at all hazards. |
| All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified. |
| The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. |
