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: “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index M > Category: Mother Tongue

Mother Tongue Quotes (3 quotes)

Mathematics, among all school subjects, is especially adapted to further clearness, definite brevity and precision in expression, although it offers no exercise in flights of rhetoric. This is due in the first place to the logical rigour with which it develops thought, avoiding every departure from the shortest, most direct way, never allowing empty phrases to enter. Other subjects excel in the development of expression in other respects: translation from foreign languages into the mother tongue gives exercise in finding the proper word for the given foreign word and gives knowledge of laws of syntax, the study of poetry and prose furnish fit patterns for connected presentation and elegant form of expression, composition is to exercise the pupil in a like presentation of his own or borrowed thoughtsand their development, the natural sciences teach description of natural objects, apparatus and processes, as well as the statement of laws on the grounds of immediate sense-perception. But all these aids for exercise in the use of the mother tongue, each in its way valuable and indispensable, do not guarantee, in the same manner as mathematical training, the exclusion of words whose concepts, if not entirely wanting, are not sufficiently clear. They do not furnish in the same measure that which the mathematician demands particularly as regards precision of expression.
In Anleitung zum mathematischen Unterricht in höheren Schulen (1906), 17.
Science quotes on:  |  Adapt (70)  |  Aid (101)  |  Allow (51)  |  Apparatus (70)  |  Avoid (123)  |  Borrow (31)  |  Brevity (8)  |  Clarity (49)  |  Clear (111)  |  Composition (86)  |  Concept (242)  |  Connect (126)  |  Definite (114)  |  Demand (131)  |  Departure (9)  |  Description (89)  |  Develop (278)  |  Development (441)  |  Direct (228)  |  Do (1905)  |  Due (143)  |  Elegant (37)  |  Empty (82)  |  Enter (145)  |  Entirely (36)  |  Excel (4)  |  Exclusion (16)  |  Exercise (113)  |  Expression (181)  |  Find (1014)  |  First (1302)  |  Fit (139)  |  Flight (101)  |  Foreign (45)  |  Form (976)  |  Furnish (97)  |  Give (208)  |  Ground (222)  |  Guarantee (30)  |  Immediate (98)  |  Indispensable (31)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Language (308)  |  Law (913)  |  Logical (57)  |  Manner (62)  |  Mathematician (407)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Measure (241)  |  Most (1728)  |  Mother (116)  |  Natural (810)  |  Natural Science (133)  |  Never (1089)  |  Object (438)  |  Offer (142)  |  Other (2233)  |  Particularly (21)  |  Pattern (116)  |  Perception (97)  |  Phrase (61)  |  Place (192)  |  Poetry (150)  |  Precision (72)  |  Presentation (24)  |  Process (439)  |  Proper (150)  |  Prose (11)  |  Pupil (62)  |  Regard (312)  |  Respect (212)  |  Rhetoric (13)  |  Rigour (21)  |  Same (166)  |  School (227)  |  Sense (785)  |  Short (200)  |  Shortest (16)  |  Statement (148)  |  Study (701)  |  Subject (543)  |  Sufficiently (9)  |  Syntax (2)  |  Teach (299)  |  Thought (995)  |  Tongue (44)  |  Training (92)  |  Translation (21)  |  Use (771)  |  Value (393)  |  Value Of Mathematics (60)  |  Want (504)  |  Way (1214)  |  Word (650)

Scientists and Drapers. Why should the botanist, geologist or other-ist give himself such airs over the draper’s assistant? Is it because he names his plants or specimens with Latin names and divides them into genera and species, whereas the draper does not formulate his classifications, or at any rate only uses his mother tongue when he does? Yet how like the sub-divisions of textile life are to those of the animal and vegetable kingdoms! A few great families—cotton, linen, hempen, woollen, silk, mohair, alpaca—into what an infinite variety of genera and species do not these great families subdivide themselves? And does it take less labour, with less intelligence, to master all these and to acquire familiarity with their various habits, habitats and prices than it does to master the details of any other great branch of science? I do not know. But when I think of Shoolbred’s on the one hand and, say, the ornithological collections of the British Museum upon the other, I feel as though it would take me less trouble to master the second than the first.
Samuel Butler, Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1917), 218.
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Animal (651)  |  Assistant (6)  |  Botanist (25)  |  Branch (155)  |  British (42)  |  British Museum (2)  |  Classification (102)  |  Collection (68)  |  Cotton (8)  |  Detail (150)  |  Divide (77)  |  Division (67)  |  Do (1905)  |  Familiarity (21)  |  Family (101)  |  Feel (371)  |  First (1302)  |  Genus (27)  |  Geologist (82)  |  Great (1610)  |  Habit (174)  |  Habitat (17)  |  Himself (461)  |  Infinite (243)  |  Intelligence (218)  |  Kingdom (80)  |  Know (1538)  |  Labor (200)  |  Latin (44)  |  Life (1870)  |  Linen (8)  |  Master (182)  |  Mother (116)  |  Museum (40)  |  Name (359)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Ornithology (21)  |  Other (2233)  |  Plant (320)  |  Price (57)  |  Say (989)  |  Scientist (881)  |  Silk (14)  |  Species (435)  |  Specimen (32)  |  Textile (2)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Think (1122)  |  Tongue (44)  |  Trouble (117)  |  Use (771)  |  Variety (138)  |  Various (205)  |  Vegetable (49)  |  Why (491)  |  Wool (4)

Symptoms are the body’s mother tongue; signs are in a foreign language.
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Body (557)  |  Foreign (45)  |  Language (308)  |  Mother (116)  |  Sign (63)  |  Symptom (38)  |  Tongue (44)


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.