We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.
CLAUDE BERNARDWe must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them.
CLAUDE BERNARDBut while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.
CLAUDE BERNARDA great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.
CLAUDE BERNARDWith 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.
CLAUDE BERNARDThe mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.
CLAUDE BERNARDThe fact that knowledge endlessly recedes as the investigator is about to grasp it is what constitutes at the same time his torment and happiness.
CLAUDE BERNARDWe achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.
CLAUDE BERNARDWe must keep our freedom of mind, and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.
CLAUDE BERNARDFirst causes are outside the realm of science.
CLAUDE BERNARDNow, a living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine endowed with the most marvellous properties and set going by means of the most complex and delicate mechanism.
CLAUDE BERNARDThose who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery.
CLAUDE BERNARDAll the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.
CLAUDE BERNARDWhen we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted.
CLAUDE BERNARDThe minds that rise and become really great are never self-satisfied, but still continue to strive.
CLAUDE BERNARDFeeling alone guides the mind.
CLAUDE BERNARDThe eloquence of a scientist is clarity; scientific truth is always more luminous when its beauty is unadorned than when it is tricked out in the embellishments with which our imagination would seek to clothe it.
CLAUDE BERNARD