Quote

The truly scientific mind is altogether unafraid of the new, and while having no mercy for ideas which have served their turn or shown their uselessness, it will not grudge to any unfamiliar conception its moment of full and friendly attention, hoping to expand rather than to minimize what small core of usefulness it may happen to contain.

Wilfred Trotter

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Wilfred Trotter
Age: 67 †
Born: 1872
Born: November 3
Died: 1939
Died: November 25
Neurosurgeon
Surgeon
University Teacher
Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter
May
Attention
Scientific
Contain
Ideas
Turns
Mercy
Expand
Mind
Rather
Core
Altogether
Uselessness
Moment
Truly
Served
Minimize
Science
Turn
Hoping
Unafraid
Moments
Full
Shown
Grudge
Happens
Happen
Conception
Unfamiliar
Truth
Small
Friendly
Usefulness

More quotes by Wilfred Trotter

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The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.
Wilfred Trotter
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It was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but the sheer inability of contemporary opinion to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense.
Wilfred Trotter
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Disease often tells its secrets in a casual parenthesis.
Wilfred Trotter
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It is necessary to guard ourselves from thinking that the practice of the scientific method enlarges the powers of the human mind. Nothing is more flatly contradicted by experience than the belief that a man distinguished in one or even more departments of science, is more likely to think sensibly about ordinary affairs than anyone else.
Wilfred Trotter
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The second thing to be striven for is intuition. This sounds an impossibility, for who can control that small quiet monitor? But intuition is only interference from experience stored and not actively recalled.
Wilfred Trotter
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An event experienced is an event perceived, digested, and assimilated into the substance of our being, and the ratio between the number of cases seen and the number of cases assimilated is the measure of experience.
Wilfred Trotter
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If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.
Wilfred Trotter
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The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease.
Wilfred Trotter
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The dispassionate intellect, the open mind, the unprejudiced observer, exist in an exact sense only in a sort of intellectualist folk-lore states even approaching them cannot be reached without a moral and emotional effort most of us cannot or will not make.
Wilfred Trotter