Auguste Comte Quotes

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

Know yourself to improve yourself.

To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

Everything is relative; and only that is absolute.

Woman is the most moral element in all humanity.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

C'este donc par l'étude des mathématiques, et seulement par elle, que l'on peut se faire une idée juste et approfondie de ce que c'est qu'une science.

Foreknowledge is power.

But now, I, August Comte, have discovered the truth. Therefore, there is no longer any need for freedom of thought or freedom of the press. I want to rule and to organize the whole country.

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

The dead govern the living.

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.

Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?

The heavens declare the glory of Kepler and Newton.

The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind.

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

To understand a science, it is necessary to know its history.

Foresight of phenomenon and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting their origin or inmost nature.