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A man really and practically looking onwards to an immortal life, on whatever grounds, exhibits to us the human soul in an enobled attitude.

— William Whewell

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Spirituality

More quotes by William Whewell

And so no force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics (1819)

No force however great can stretch a cord however fine into an horizontal line which is accurately straight.

It is a test of true theories not only to account for but to predict phenomena.

Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of Error is without some latent charm derived from Truth.

The use of mathematical study, with which we have to do, is not to produce a school of eminent mathematicians, but to contribute to a Liberal Education of the highest kind.

Of a Liberal Education in General (1850)

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Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Whewell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.