TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index A > Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt Quotes

Thumbnail of Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt (source)
Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
(20 Jul 1836 - 22 Feb 1925)

English physician who invented the short clinical thermometer (1866).


Science Quotes by Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt (9 quotes)

Another source of fallacy is the vicious circle of illusions which consists on the one hand of believing what we see, and on the other in seeing what we believe.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Attributed. Peter McDonald, In The Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations (2004), 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Circle (117)  |  Consist (223)  |  Error (339)  |  Fallacy (31)  |  Illusion (68)  |  Other (2233)  |  See (1094)  |  Seeing (143)

In science, law is not a rule imposed from without, but an expression of an intrinsic process. The laws of the lawgiver are impotent beside the laws of human nature, as to his disillusion many a lawgiver has discovered.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Attributed. Peter McDonald, In The Oxford Dictionary of Medical Quotations (2004), 2.
Science quotes on:  |  Discover (571)  |  Expression (181)  |  Human (1512)  |  Human Nature (71)  |  Intrinsic (18)  |  Law (913)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Process (439)  |  Rule (307)

It is steadily forgotten that health is a diathesis as much as is scrofula or syphilis and that each of these is a mode of growth.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
In Fielding Hudson Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1929), 15.
Science quotes on:  |  Forgotten (53)  |  Growth (200)  |  Health (210)  |  Mode (43)  |  Syphilis (6)

Lister saw the vast importance of the discoveries of Pasteur. He saw it because he was watching on the heights, and he was watching there alone.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Baron Joseph Lister', The Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), 778.
Science quotes on:  |  Alone (324)  |  Importance (299)  |  Lord Joseph Lister (8)  |  Saw (160)  |  Vast (188)

Medicine, likewise, because it deals with things, has always been for our serener circles a Cinderella, blooming maid as happily as she has grown nevertheless.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
In Fielding Hudson Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1929), 16.
Science quotes on:  |  Circle (117)  |  Deal (192)  |  Medicine (392)  |  Nevertheless (90)  |  Thing (1914)

Students who have attended my [medical] lectures may remember that I try not only to teach them what we know, but also to realise how little this is: in every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon to an end.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
In Notes on the Composition of Scientific Papers (1904), 3.
Science quotes on:  |  Attend (67)  |  Best (467)  |  Direction (185)  |  Doubt (314)  |  End (603)  |  Eye (440)  |  Know (1538)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Lecture (111)  |  Little (717)  |  Open (277)  |  Opening (15)  |  Path (159)  |  Realize (157)  |  Remember (189)  |  Remembering (7)  |  See (1094)  |  Short (200)  |  Soon (187)  |  Stop (89)  |  Student (317)  |  Teach (299)  |  Teaching (190)  |  Travel (125)  |  Travelling (17)  |  Try (296)  |  Trying (144)  |  Way (1214)

The use of thesis-writing is to train the mind, or to prove that the mind has been trained; the former purpose is, I trust, promoted, the evidences of the latter are scanty and occasional.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
From Preface to First Edition to Notes on the Composition of Scientific Papers (1904), v.
Science quotes on:  |  Evidence (267)  |  Former (138)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Occasional (23)  |  Promotion (8)  |  Proof (304)  |  Prove (261)  |  Purpose (336)  |  Scanty (3)  |  Thesis (17)  |  Train (118)  |  Training (92)  |  Trust (72)  |  Use (771)  |  Writing (192)

Thus we work not in the light of public opinion but in the secrecy of the chamber; and perhaps the best of us are apt at times to forget the delicacies and sincerities which under these conditions are essential to harmony and honour.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
On Professional Education with Special Reference to Medicine (), 78.
Science quotes on:  |  Best (467)  |  Condition (362)  |  Essential (210)  |  Forget (125)  |  Harmony (105)  |  Honour (58)  |  Light (635)  |  Opinion (291)  |  Physician (284)  |  Time (1911)  |  Work (1402)

We are led to think of diseases as isolated disturbances in a healthy body, not as the phases of certain periods of bodily development.
— Sir Thomas Clifford Allbutt
The Significance of Skin Affections in the Classification of Disease', St. Georges Hospital Reports (1867), Vol. 2, 189.
Science quotes on:  |  Body (557)  |  Certain (557)  |  Development (441)  |  Disease (340)  |  Disturbance (34)  |  Health (210)  |  Healthy (70)  |  Period (200)  |  Phase (37)  |  Think (1122)


See also:

Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.