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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

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.

Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

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.

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.

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

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

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.

To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter.