Arthur Eddington Quotes

It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control.

The human mind may perceive truth only through thinking, as is clear from Augustine.

Our minds are specifically adapted to developing certain theories, and we have a science if the theories that are available to our minds happen to be close to true. Well, there is no particular reason to suppose that the intersection of true theories and theories that are accessible to the mind is very large. It may not be very large.

Science shows us truth and beauty and fills each day with a fresh wonder of the exquisite order which governs our world.

From the dawn of history, science has probed the universe of unknowns, searching for the uniting laws of nature.

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

Do not imagine that what we have said of the insufficiency of our understanding and of its limited extent is an assertion founded only on the Bible: for philosophers likewise assert the same, and perfectly understand it,- without having regard to any religion or opinion.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance.

Either theology is pure nonsense, a subject with no content, or else theology must ultimately become a branch of physics.

Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.

Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.

I think, therefore I am.

Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind.

If we define a miracle as an effect of which the cause is unknown to us, then we make our ignorance the source of miracles! And the universe itself would be a standing miracle. A miracle might be perhaps defined more exactly as an effect which is not the consequence or effect of any known laws of nature.

The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

Logicians have but ill defined As rational the human mind; Reason, they say, belongs to man, But let them prove it if they can.

There are very deep and restrictive principles that determine the nature of human language and are rooted in the specific character of the human mind

Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.

But nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.

Old heads as well as young may sometimes be charged with ignorance and presumption. The natural course of the human mind is certainly from credulity to skepticism.

Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.

The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

Just as the eye was made to see colours, and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand, not whatever you please, but quantity.