Quotes from Ernst Mach

obviously it matters little if we think of the earth as turning about on its axis, or if we view it at rest while the fixed stars revolve around it. Geometrically these are exacly the same case of a relative rotation of the earth and the fixed stars with respect to one another.

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

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

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

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.

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.

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

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

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

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