Aulus Cornelius Celsus Quotes
Credulity without enquiry is a sure way to deceive oneself.
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, 25 BC-50, Roman Encyclopedist, Quoted from Antony Flew, Atheistic Humanism
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Original French: “Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent.”
Ibn al-Nafis was one of the great scientists of all time. He analyzed the human heart, lungs, and circulatory system. This quotation is often given by Muslim modernists and reformers to illustrate that Islam at one time was open to new knowledge, dissent, ideas of all kinds. A century later, Islam closed intellectually and later and even today, Muslims are killed for what became heresy. Truth became determined by the Koran and the words of The Prophet only, Christianity and the Church imposed a similar restrictive view of truth using the Bible and Jesus. However, the Reformation and modernity led Christianity to merge and adopt the more modern and scientific view with the exception of some Christian fundamentalists. Islam had the modern view and abandoned it causing the many educated Islamic reformers and modernists of today great difficulty in changing the culture and laws as a whole.
Aulus Cornelius Celsus (c. 25 BC – c. 50 AD) was a Roman encyclopaedist, known for his extant medical work, De Medicina, which is believed to be the only surviving section of a much larger encyclopedia. The De Medicina is a primary source on diet, pharmacy, surgery and related fields, and it is one of the best sources concerning medical knowledge in the Roman world. The lost portions of his encyclopedia likely included volumes on agriculture, law, rhetoric, and military arts. He made contributions to the classification of human skin disorders in dermatology, such as Myrmecia, and his name is often occurring in medical terms about the skin, e.g., kerion celsi and area celsi.
