Top 50 Claude Bernard Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.”

— Claude Bernard

Featured in: Learning Quotes

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

— Claude Bernard

3. “Tout est poison, rien n’est poison, tout est une question de dose. Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.”

— Claude Bernard

4. “Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown.”

— Claude Bernard

5. “We achieve more than we know. We know more than we understand. We understand more than we can explain.”

— Claude Bernard

6. “If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation.”

— Claude Bernard

7. “The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for free and independent life: the mechanism that makes it possible is that which assured the maintenance, with the internal environment, of all the conditions necessary for the life of the elements.”

— Claude Bernard

8. “Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.”

— Claude Bernard

9. “Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.”

— Claude Bernard

10. “True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.”

— Claude Bernard

11. “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.”

— Claude Bernard

12. “Feeling alone guides the mind.”

— Claude Bernard

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

— Claude Bernard

14. “Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride.”

— Claude Bernard

15. “We must remain, in a word, in an intellectual disposition which seems paradoxical, but which, in my opinion, represents the true mind of the investigator. We must have a robust faith and yet not believe.”

— Claude Bernard

16. “Well-observed facts, though brought to light by passing theories, will never die; they are the material on which alone the house of science will at last be built.”

— Claude Bernard

17. “Experiment is fundamentally only induced observation.”

— Claude Bernard

18. “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.”

— Claude Bernard

19. “The 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 Bernard

20. “The 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 Bernard

21. “The doubter is a true man of science: he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science.”

— Claude Bernard

22. “Those who do not know the torment of the unknown cannot have the joy of discovery.”

— Claude Bernard

23. “Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge. It is in the darker. It is in the darker regions of science that great men are recognized; they are marked by ideas which light up phenomena hitherto obscure and carry science forward.”

— Claude Bernard

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

— Claude Bernard

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

— Claude Bernard

26. “The science of life is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.”

— Claude Bernard

27. “A 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 Bernard

28. “When 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 Bernard

29. “Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena; we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet that we have used long enough.”

— Claude Bernard

30. “In science, the best precept is to alter and exchange our ideas as fast as science moves ahead.”

— Claude Bernard

31. “Science admits no exceptions; otherwise there would be no determinism in science, or rather, there would be no science.”

— Claude Bernard

32. “Art is I; Science is We.”

— Claude Bernard

33. “A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory.”

— Claude Bernard

34. “The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.”

— Claude Bernard

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

— Claude Bernard

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

— Claude Bernard

37. “The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.”

— Claude Bernard

38. “The first requirement in using statistics is that the facts treated shall be reduced to comparable units.”

— Claude Bernard

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

39. “Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.”

— Claude Bernard

40. “Now, 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 Bernard

41. “Hatred is the most clear- sighted, next to genius...”

— Claude Bernard

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

— Claude Bernard

43. “The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.”

— Claude Bernard

44. “In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.”

— Claude Bernard

45. “Science rejects the indeterminate.”

— Claude Bernard

46. “The 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

47. “Particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science.”

— Claude Bernard

48. “Real science exists, then, only from the moment when a phenomenon is accurately defined as to its nature and rigorously determined in relation to its material conditions, that is, when its law is known. Before that, we have only groping and empiricism.”

— Claude Bernard

49. “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.”

— Claude Bernard

50. “Theories are like a stairway; by climbing, science widens its horizon more and more, because theories embody and necessarily include proportionately more facts as they advance.”

— Claude Bernard