54 Quotes by Ernst Mach

Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources; only success can tell one from the other.

To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter.

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.

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

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

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

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.

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

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.