Ernst Mach quotes

Ernst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, renowned for his work in the fields of physics, sensory perception, and the philosophy of science. His contributions influenced the development of logical positivism and the theory of relativity. He profoundly shaped modern science with his critical analysis of scientific concepts and experimental methods. Here are 34 of his quotes:

Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the `elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all `bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes.

Ernst Mach

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Ernst Mach

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Ernst Mach

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

Ernst Mach

If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

Ernst Mach

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

Ernst Mach

In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.

Ernst Mach

I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.

Ernst Mach

Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

Ernst Mach

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

Ernst Mach

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

Ernst Mach

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Ernst Mach

Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

Ernst Mach

Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

Ernst Mach

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach

The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

Ernst Mach

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

Ernst Mach

The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

Ernst Mach

The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.

Ernst Mach

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

Ernst Mach

Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

Ernst Mach

Nature consists of the elements given by the senses. Primitive man first takes out of them certain complexes of these elements that present themselves with a certain stability and are most important to him. The first and oldest words are names for "things". ... The sensations are no "symbols of things". On the contrary the "thing" is a mental symbol for a sensation-complex of relative stability. Not the things, the bodies, but colours, sounds, pressures, times (what we usually call sensations) are the true elements of the world.

Ernst Mach