Ernst Mach Quotes

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.

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.

Science is the most complete presentment of facts with the least expenditure of thought

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

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.

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.

Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.

Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

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.

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible expenditure of thought.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

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

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

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.

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.

The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.

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.

The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.