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What Mach calls a thought experiment is of course not an experiment at all. At bottom it is a grammatical investigation.

Ernst Mach

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Ernst Mach
Age: 78 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 18
Died: 1916
Died: February 19
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More quotes by Ernst Mach

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Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.
Ernst Mach
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Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.
Ernst Mach
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My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.
Ernst Mach
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.
Ernst Mach
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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
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Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.
Ernst Mach
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Science is the most complete presentment of facts with the least expenditure of thought
Ernst Mach
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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
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Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.
Ernst Mach
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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
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Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.
Ernst Mach
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The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
Ernst Mach
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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
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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
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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
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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