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If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation.

Claude Bernard

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Claude Bernard
Age: 64 †
Born: 1813
Born: July 12
Died: 1878
Died: February 10
Physician Writer
Physiologist
Politician
Professor
Psychologist
Science
Characteristics
Differentiates
Thought
Define
Sharply
Life
Relief
Differentiate
Clearly
Characteristic
Express
Biological
Creation
Phrase
Single
Phrases
Opinion
Throwing

More quotes by Claude Bernard

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Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet that we have used long enough.
Claude Bernard
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Priestley [said] that each discovery we make shows us many others that should be made.
Claude Bernard
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In a word, I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine they are the first field of observation which a physician enters but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis.
Claude Bernard
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Obervation is a passive science, experimentation is an active science.
Claude Bernard
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In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations.
Claude Bernard
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The terrain is everything the germ is nothing.
Claude Bernard
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Proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that when this condition is removed, the phenomen will no longer appear.
Claude Bernard
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The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.
Claude Bernard
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Now, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.
Claude Bernard
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Men who believe too firmly in their theories, do not believe enough in the theories of others. So ... these despisers of their fellows ... make experiments only to destroy a theory, instead of to seek the truth.
Claude Bernard
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The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.
Claude Bernard
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We must alter theory to adapt it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory.
Claude Bernard
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In these researches I followed the principles of the experimental method that we have established, i.e., that, in presence of a well-noted, new fact which contradicts a theory, instead of keeping the theory and abandoning the fact, I should keep and study the fact, and I hastened to give up the theory.
Claude Bernard
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The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.
Claude Bernard
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A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,-'Art is myself science is ourselves. '
Claude Bernard
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The goal of scientific physicians in their own science ... is to reduce the indeterminate. Statistics therefore apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still indeterminate.
Claude Bernard
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A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory.
Claude Bernard
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We achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.
Claude Bernard
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The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.
Claude Bernard
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Effects vary with the conditions which bring them to pass, but laws do not vary. Physiological and pathological states are ruled by the same forces they differ only because of the special conditions under which the vital laws manifest themselves.
Claude Bernard