Science and Reason

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.

An undevout astronomer is mad.

I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.

The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity.

One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, but science makes God unnecessary.

Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.

Any two philosophers can tell each other all they know in two hours.

Economics is the painful elaboration of the obvious.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

The belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science. Since, however, sense perception only gives information of this external world or of “physical reality” indirectly, we can only grasp the latter by speculative means. It follows from this that our notions of physical reality can never be final.

I understand Jung’s vague, imprecise notions, but I consider them worthless—a lot of talk without any clear direction. If there has to be a psychiatrist, I should prefer Freud. I do not believe in him, but I love very much his concise style and his original, although rather extravagant, mind.

I do not like to state an opinion on a matter unless I know the precise facts.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our "concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be.

The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself.

Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect.

I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Deus, sive Natura .

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.