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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index C > Category: Coarse

Coarse Quotes (4 quotes)

All the properties that we designate as activity of the soul, are only the functions of the cerebral substance, and to express ourselves in a coarser way, thought is just about to the brain what bile is to the liver and urine to the kidney. It is absurd to admit an independent soul who uses the cerebellum as an instrument with which he would work as he pleases.
Carl Vogt
As quoted in William Vogt, La Vie d'un Homme, Carl Vogt (1896), 48. Translated by Webmaster, from the original French, “Toutes les propriétés que nous designons sous le nom d’activité de l’âme, ne sont que les fonctions de la substance cérébrale, et pour nous exprimer d’ une façon plus grossière, la pensée est à peu près au cerveau ce que la bile est au foie et l’urine au rein. Il est absurde d’ admettre une âme indépendante qui se serve du cervelet comme d’un instrument avec lequelle travaillerait comme il lui plait.”
Science quotes on:  |  Absurd (60)  |  Activity (218)  |  Admit (49)  |  Bile (5)  |  Brain (281)  |  Cerebellum (4)  |  Cerebral (2)  |  Express (192)  |  Function (235)  |  Independent (74)  |  Instrument (158)  |  Kidney (19)  |  Liver (22)  |  Name (359)  |  Ourselves (247)  |  Please (68)  |  Property (177)  |  Soul (235)  |  Substance (253)  |  Thought (995)  |  Urine (18)  |  Use (771)  |  Way (1214)  |  Work (1402)

As for the place of mathematics in relation to other sciences, mathematics can be seen as a big warehouse full of shelves. Mathematicians put things on the shelves and guarantee that they are true. They also explain how to use them and how to reconstruct them. Other sciences come and help themselves from the shelves; mathematicians are not concerned with what they do with what they have taken. This metaphor is rather coarse, but it reflects the situation well enough.
From interview with Marc Kirch, 'My First Fifty years at the Collège de France', collected in Helge Holden and Ragni Piene, The Abel Prize: 2003-2007 The First Five Years (2009), 15-29.
Science quotes on:  |  Concern (239)  |  Do (1905)  |  Enough (341)  |  Explain (334)  |  Guarantee (30)  |  Help (116)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Metaphor (37)  |  Other (2233)  |  Reconstruct (5)  |  Reflect (39)  |  Relation (166)  |  Shelf (8)  |  Situation (117)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Thing (1914)  |  True (239)  |  Use (771)

Pope has elegantly said a perfect woman's but a softer man. And if we take in the consideration, that there can be but one rule of moral excellence for beings made of the same materials, organized after the same manner, and subjected to similar laws of Nature, we must either agree with Mr. Pope, or we must reverse the proposition, and say, that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold.
Letter XXII. 'No Characteristic Difference in Sex'. In Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790), 128.
Science quotes on:  |  Being (1276)  |  Consideration (143)  |  Excellence (40)  |  Form (976)  |  Law (913)  |  Law Of Nature (80)  |  Man (2252)  |  Manner (62)  |  Material (366)  |  Mold (37)  |  Moral (203)  |  Must (1525)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Perfect (223)  |  Pope (10)  |  Alexander Pope (45)  |  Proposition (126)  |  Reverse (33)  |  Rule (307)  |  Say (989)  |  Soft (30)  |  Subject (543)  |  Woman (160)

Religion and science ... constitute deep-rooted and ancient efforts to find richer experience and deeper meaning than are found in the ordinary biological and social satisfactions. As pointed out by Whitehead, religion and science have similar origins and are evolving toward similar goals. Both started from crude observations and fanciful concepts, meaningful only within a narrow range of conditions for the people who formulated them of their limited tribal experience. But progressively, continuously, and almost simultaneously, religious and scientific concepts are ridding themselves of their coarse and local components, reaching higher and higher levels of abstraction and purity. Both the myths of religion and the laws of science, it is now becoming apparent, are not so much descriptions of facts as symbolic expressions of cosmic truths.
'On Being Human,' A God Within, Scribner (1972).
Science quotes on:  |  Abstraction (48)  |  Ancient (198)  |  Apparent (85)  |  Become (821)  |  Becoming (96)  |  Biological (137)  |  Both (496)  |  Component (51)  |  Concept (242)  |  Condition (362)  |  Constitute (99)  |  Continuously (7)  |  Cosmic (74)  |  Crude (32)  |  Deep (241)  |  Description (89)  |  Effort (243)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Experience (494)  |  Expression (181)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Fanciful (6)  |  Find (1014)  |  Formulate (16)  |  Goal (155)  |  High (370)  |  Law (913)  |  Level (69)  |  Limit (294)  |  Limited (102)  |  Local (25)  |  Mean (810)  |  Meaning (244)  |  Meaningful (19)  |  Myth (58)  |  Narrow (85)  |  Observation (593)  |  Ordinary (167)  |  Origin (250)  |  People (1031)  |  Point (584)  |  Progressively (4)  |  Purity (15)  |  Range (104)  |  Reach (286)  |  Religion (369)  |  Religious (134)  |  Rich (66)  |  Rid (14)  |  Root (121)  |  Satisfaction (76)  |  Science And Religion (337)  |  Scientific (955)  |  Similar (36)  |  Simultaneous (23)  |  Social (261)  |  Start (237)  |  Symbolic (16)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Toward (45)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Alfred North Whitehead (140)


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)
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- 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
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