William Harvey Quotes

I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I'm an amateur physician, I guess.

The human body is essentially something other than an animal organism.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

In nature, when you conduct science, it is the natural world that is the ultimate decider in what is true and what is not.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

That's the whole problem with science. You've got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.

My colleagues have learned to respect nothing but evidence, and to believe that their highest duty lies in submitting to it, however it may jar against their inclinations.

Primary causes are unknown to us; but are subject to simple and constant laws, which may be discovered by observation, the study of them being the object of natural philosophy.

Cross pollination of fields, innovation in one stimulates revolutionary changes in another. All the instruments in a hospital which allow us observation of the human body without cutting you open were based on principles of physicists developed by physicists who had no interest in medicine. This is the way innovation moves from one field to another.

In the collecting of evidence upon any medical subject, there are but three sources from which we can hope to obtain it: viz. from observation of the living subject; from examination of the dead; and from experiments upon living animals.

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

I liked medicine. I liked helping people. I liked the biology of it and understanding how the body works.

The human body is something that I truly love, above all else.

The greatest step forward would be to see that everything factual is already theory. The blueness of the sky reveals the basic lawof chromatics. Don't look for anything behind the phenomena, they themselves are the doctrine.

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

Knowledge of anatomy is a tool like good brushes.

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.

Science is the poetry of reality.

For first of all we must prepare a Natural and Experimental History, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all; for we are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover, what nature does or may be made to do.

Anatomy presupposes a corpse; psychology presupposes a world of corpses.

Science is the best tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.

Medicine deals with the states of health and disease in the human body. It is a truism of philosophy that a complete knowledge of a thing can only be obtained by elucidating its causes and antecedents, provided, of course, such causes exist. In medicine it is, therefore, necessary that causes of both health and disease should be determined.

Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.

Religion and science have always been matters of faith in something. It is the same something.

Science, which is only another name for truth, now holds religious charlatans, self-deceivers and God agents in a certain degree of check--agents and employees, I mean, of a mythical, medieval, man-made God, anthropomorphic in constitution.