51 Quotes by Ivan Pavlov

Precise knowledge of what happens to the food entering the organism must be the subject of ideal physiology, the physiology of the future.

So the stimulation effected by the act of eating reaches the gastric glands by means of the nerve fibres that are contained in the vagus nerves.

One can truly say that the irresistible progress of natural science since the time of Galileo has made its first halt before the study of the higher parts of the brain, the organ of the most complicated relations of the animal to the external world. And it seems, and not without reason, that now is the really critical moment for natural science; for the brain, in its highest complexity-the human brain-which created and creates natural science, itself becomes the object of this science.

The digestive canal is in its task a complete chemical factory. The raw material passes through a long series of institutions in which it is subjected to certain mechanical and, mainly, chemical processing, and then, through innumerable side-streets, it is brought into the depot of the body. Aside from this basic series of institutions, along which the raw material moves, there is a series of lateral chemical manufactories, which prepare certain reagents for the appropriate processing of the raw material.

Do not become archivists of facts. Try to penetrate to the secret of their occurrence, persistently search for the laws which govern them.

As we have seen, bread, and especially dry bread, evokes secretion of considerably larger quantities of saliva than meat.

Learn, compare, collect the facts!

Possibilities are like the wings of birds; they allow man to soar and to climb to the heavens. And facts are like the atmosphere against which those wings must beat, and without which the soaring bird will surely plummet back to earth.

Learn the ABC of science before you try to ascend to its summit.