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. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.

Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.

In football, sometimes things happen that are outside of your control, leading the club to make decisions.

Sometimes, what you do you have no control over because it's predestined. It's gonna happen in spite of you. There's nothing you can do about it.

Man never legislates, but destinies and accidents, happening in all sorts of ways, legislate in all sorts of ways.

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live. To be evil, you have to have intent. Any remarkable natural happening in which no human will is employed cannot be regarded as evil.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

Every new discovery of science is a further 'revelation' of the order which God has built into His universe.

These long chains of perfectly simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to carry out their most difficult demonstrations had led me to fancy that everything that can fall under human knowledge forms a similar sequence; and that so long as we avoid accepting as true what is not so, and always preserve the right order of deduction of one thing from another, there can be nothing too remote to be reached in the end, or to well hidden to be discovered.

God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning.

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

The cause and root of nearly all evils in the sciences is this-that while we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind we neglect to seek for its true helps.

The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature.

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.

What is intelligence, anyway It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: It describes not some definite thing but only the momentary horizon of our ignorance about how minds might work.

The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

Fate, however, is to all appearance more unavoidable than unexpected.

Is Knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know?