14 quotes
The analyst, who pursues a purely esthetic aim, helps create, just by that, a language more fit to satisfy the physicist.
The Value of Science (1905)
Without interpolation all science would be impossible.
The Value of Science (1907)
We have not a direct intuition of the equality of two intervals of time.
The Value of Science (1905)
Scientists believe there is a hierarchy of facts and that among them may be made a judicious choice. They are right, since otherwise there would be no science...
The Value of Science (1905)
But these labels can only be finite in number. On that score, psychologic time should be discontinuous.
The Value of Science (1905)
As we can not give a general definition of energy, the principle of the conservation of energy signifies simply that there is something which remains constant.
The Value of Science (1905)
If all the parts of the universe are interchained in a certain measure, any one phenomenon will not be the effect of a single cause, but the resultant of causes infinitely numerous; it is, one often says, the consequence of the state of the universe the moment before.
The Value of Science (1905)
What has taught us to know the true profound analogies, those the eyes do not see but reason divines?
It is the mathematical spirit, which disdains matter to cling only to pure form.
The Value of Science (1905)
Is not my present nearer my past of yesterday than the present of Sirius?
The Value of Science (1905)
Time and Space … It is not nature which imposes them upon us, it is we who impose them upon nature because we find them convenient.
The Value of Science (1905)
The mathematician is born, not made.
The Value of Science (1905)
[W]e should say: Causes almost identical take almost the same time to produce almost the same effects.
The Value of Science (1905)
[H]ave we really the right to speak of the cause of a phenomenon?
The Value of Science (1905)
All that is not thought is pure nothingness...And yet—strange contradiction for those who believe in time—geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night. But it is this gleam which is everything.
The Value of Science (1905)