Quotes from Ernst Mach

A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed movement, which always takes place when the image is vivid enough.

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

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

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.

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.

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.

The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

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

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

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.

Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

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

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

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.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

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

The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources; only success can tell one from the other.

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