Ernst Mach Quotes

• My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Temperature, Difference

• Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Themselves, Poorly

• Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Man

• Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Myself, Quite, Foreign

• A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Physical, Dependence

• If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dreams, Importance

• Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Body, Sensations, Elements

• A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed movement, which always takes place when the image is vivid enough.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Executed, Movement

• Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Pleasure, Sensations

• Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Man, Young, Astronomy

• The biological task of science is to provide the fully developed human individual with as perfect a means of orientating himself as possible. No other scientific ideal can be realised, and any other must be meaningless.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human, Perfect, Science

• Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Science, Thought

• Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Physics

• The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fact, Philosopher, Mankind

• The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ego

• The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Familiar

• The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Knowledge, Life

  Tags in Conditions

• The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ourselves, Lives

• Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, – the colours, sounds, and so forth – nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Body, Elements

• When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

  Ernst Mach

  Topics in Youth

  Tags in Person, Memories

Ernst Mach (21)

Birth:	18th February, 1838
Death:	19th February, 1916
Nationality:	Austrian
Profession:	Philosopher, Physicist

About

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was born in Brno, Moravia, Austria. He was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, noted for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves. His early work focused on the Doppler effect in optics and acoustics. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism, American pragmatism and through his criticism of Newton, a forerunner of Einstein's relativity. He received his doctorate in physics from the University of Vienna in 1860. In 1864 he took a job as Professor of Mathematics at the University of Graz. In 1867, he took the chair of Experimental Physics at the Charles University, Prague, where he stayed for 28 years.

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