Quote

The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

Ernst Mach

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ernst Mach
Age: 78 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 18
Died: 1916
Died: February 19
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Photographer
Physicist
Politician
Professor
Ernst Mach Jr
Full
Presentation
Knowledge
Adapt
Desire
Formed
Ends
Conception
Men
Average
Favourably
Life
Pure
Presentations
World
Conditions
Conceptions
Struggle
Dominated

More quotes by Ernst Mach

Image
Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.
Ernst Mach
Image
The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.
Ernst Mach
Image
Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.
Ernst Mach
Image
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.
Ernst Mach
Image
The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.
Ernst Mach
Image
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.
Ernst Mach
Image
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.
Ernst Mach
Image
Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.
Ernst Mach
Image
Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.
Ernst Mach
Image
Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).
Ernst Mach
Image
A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.
Ernst Mach
Image
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.
Ernst Mach
Image
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.
Ernst Mach
Image
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.
Ernst Mach
Image
Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.
Ernst Mach
Image
Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.
Ernst Mach
Image
I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.
Ernst Mach
Image
Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.
Ernst Mach
Image
To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.
Ernst Mach
Image
Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.
Ernst Mach