Empiricism Quotes

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

To measure is to know. If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

I only believe in what I see and hear with my own eyes and ears.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it

I am an intransigent atheist, though not a militant one. This means that I am not fighting against religion - I am fighting for reason.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

I ask you to believe nothing that you cannot verify for yourself.

The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it.

I have never seen an angel. Show me an angel, and I'll paint one.

The test of all knowledge is experiment.

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.

Let us come to the philosophers, whose authority is of greater weight, and their judgment more to be relied on, because they are believed to have paid attention, not to matters of fiction, but to the investigation of the truth.

All our knowledge hast its origins in our perceptions … In nature there is no effect without a cause … Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments … Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass.

Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things.

A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.

I do not believe in God. I'm an atheist. I consider myself a critical thinker, and it fascinates me that in the 21st century most people still believe in, as George Carlin puts it, 'the invisible man living in the sky'

Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves.

I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.

We need only reflect on what has been prov'd at large, that we are never sensible of any connexion betwixt causes and effects, and that 'tis only by our experience of their constant conjunction, we can arrive at any knowledge of this relation.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Never believe on faith, see for yourself! What you yourself don't learn you don't know.

We are materialists and atheists, and we glory in the fact.

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.