“Obervation is a passive science, experimentation is an active science.”

The terrain is everything; the germ is nothing.

The joy of discovery is certainly the liveliest that the mind of man can ever feel.

The experimenter who does not know what he is looking for will not understand what he finds.

The better educated we are and the more acquired information we have, the better prepared shall we find our minds for making great and fruitful discoveries.

A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.

We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.

Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.

Effects vary with the conditions which bring them to pass, but laws do not vary. Physiological and pathological states are ruled by the same forces; they differ only because of the special conditions under which the vital laws manifest themselves.

Priestley said that each discovery we make shows us many others that should be made.

With the aid of these active experimental sciences man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress of the experimental sciences.

The minds that rise and become really great are never self-satisfied, but still continue to strive.

But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

Science does not permit exceptions.

All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.

A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.

Put off your imagination, as you put off your overcoat, when you enter the laboratory. Put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, when you leave.

Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive.

For me, the Immaculate Conception is the feast of ‘passive action,’ the action that functions simply by the transmission through us of divine energy.

Dr. King used Gandhi’s commitment to non-violence and to passive resistance.

To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

There is, of course, no joy so great as the cessation of pain; in fact all joy, active or passive, is the cessation of some pain, since it must be the satisfaction of a longing, even perhaps an unconscious longing.

We cannot be passive and silent towards those who reject God’s Word and our holy faith.

Society expects man to be a passive social animal who believes like the People of the Field in “Jurgen” that “to do what you always have done” and “what is expected of you” are the twin rules of life.