72 quotes
Let us not be exacting; perfection is so rare.
Indulgence! Indulgence!
Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)
The production of motive power is then due... not to an actual consumption of caloric, but to its transportation from a warm body to a cold body... to its re-establishment of equilibrium...
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Steam navigation... tends to unite the nations of the earth as inhahitants of one country. ...is not this the same as greatly to shorten distances?
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
We shall have [a complete theory] only when the laws of Physics shall be extended enough, generalized enough, to make known beforehand all the effects of heat acting in a determined manner on any body.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
War has been represented as necessary to prevent the too rapid increase of the population, but war mows down the flower of the young men, while it spares the men disgraced by nature. Hence it tends to the degeneration of the species.
Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)
To take away to-day from England her steam-engines would be to take away at the same time her coal and iron. It would be to dry up all her sources of wealth, to ruin all on which her prosperity depends, in short, to annihilate that colossal power.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
[T]he production of heat alone is not sufficient to give birth to the impelling power: it is necessary that there should also be cold; without it, the heat would be useless.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
There is almost as great a distance between the first apparatus in which the expansive force of steam was displayed and the existing machine, as between the first raft that man ever made and the modern vessel.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
In order to consider in the most general way the principle of the production of motion by heat, it must be considered independently of any mechanism or any particular agent. It is necessary to establish principles applicable not only to steam engines but to all imaginable heat-engines, whatever the working substance and whatever the method by which it is operated.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat and on Machines Fitted to Develop Power (1824)
What motives have influenced the writers who have rejected all religious systems? Is it the conviction that the ideas which they oppose are all injurious to society? Have they not rather included in the same proscription religion and the abuse of it?
Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)
Nature, in providing us with combustibles on all sides, has given us the power to produce, at all times and in all places, heat and the impelling power which is the result of it. To develop this power, to appropriate it to our uses, is the object of heat-engines.
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Never direct an argument against any one. If you know some particulars against your adversary, you have a right to make him aware of it to keep him under control, but proceed with discretion, and do not wound him before others.
Posthumous Manuscripts (1878)