List of Ernst Mach Quotes

All This, The Positive And Physical Essence Of Mechanics, Which Makes Its Chief And Highest Interest For A Student Of Nature, Is In Existing Treatises Completely Buried And Concealed Beneath A Mass Of Technical Considerations.

In Reality, The Law Always Contains Less Than The Fact Itself, Because It Does Not Reproduce The Fact As A Whole But Only In That Aspect Of It Which Is Important For Us, The Rest Being Intentionally Or From Necessity Omitted.

Without Renouncing The Support Of Physics, It Is Possible For The Physiology Of The Senses, Not Only To Pursue Its Own Course Of Development, But Also To Afford To Physical Science Itself Powerful Assistance.

I Once Knew An Otherwise Excellent Teacher Who Compelled His Students To Perform All Their Demonstrations With Incorrect Figures, On The Theory That It Was The Logical Connection Of The Concepts, Not The Figure, That Was Essential.

It Would Not Become Physical Science To See In Its Self Created, Changeable, Economical Tools, Molecules And Atoms, Realities Behind Phenomena... The Atom Must Remain A Tool For Representing Phenomena.

Archimedes Constructing His Circle Pays With His Life For His Defective Biological Adaptation To Immediate Circumstances.

Similarly, Many A Young Man, Hearing For The First Time Of The Refraction Of Stellar Light, Has Thought That Doubt Was Cast On The Whole Of Astronomy, Whereas Nothing Is Required But An Easily Effected And Unimportant Correction To Put Everything Right Again.

The Biological Task Of Science Is To Provide The Fully Developed Human Individual With As Perfect A Means Of Orientating Himself As Possible. No Other Scientific Ideal Can Be Realised, And Any Other Must Be Meaningless.

A Movement That We Will To Execute Is Never More Than A Represented Movement, And Appears In A Different Domain From That Of The Executed Movement, Which Always Takes Place When The Image Is Vivid Enough.

Ordinarily Pleasure And Pain Are Regarded As Different From Sensations.

The Task Which We Have Set Ourselves Is Simply To Show Why And For What Purpose We Hold That Standpoint During Most Of Our Lives, And Why And For What Purpose We Are Provisionally Obliged To Abandon It.

When I Recall Today My Early Youth, I Should Take The Boy That I Then Was, With The Exception Of A Few Individual Features, For A Different Person, Were It Not For The Existence Of The Chain Of Memories.