Top 35 Ernst Mach Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Ernst Mach

2. “Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.”

— Ernst Mach

3. “I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.”

— Ernst Mach

4. “The history of the development of mechanics is quite indispensable to a full comprehension of the science in its present condition. It also affords a simple and instructive example or the processes by which natural science generally is developed.”

— Ernst Mach

5. “Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.”

— Ernst Mach

6. “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

7. “Thought experiment is in any case a necessary precondition for physical experiment. Every experimenter and inventor must have the planned arrangement in his head before translating it into fact.”

— Ernst Mach

8. “The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.”

— Ernst Mach

9. “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

10. “Strange as it may sound, the power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations.”

— Ernst Mach

11. “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

12. “Mathematics may be defined as the economy of counting. There is no problem in the whole of mathematics which cannot be solved by direct counting.”

— Ernst Mach

13. “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

14. “In reality, the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole but only in that aspect of it which is important for us, the rest being intentionally or from necessity omitted.”

— Ernst Mach

15. “Science is the most complete presentment of facts with the least expenditure of thought.”

— Ernst Mach

16. “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

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

— Ernst Mach

18. “Personally, people know themselves very poorly.”

— Ernst Mach

19. “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

20. “I once knew an otherwise excellent teacher who compelled his students to perform all their demonstrations with incorrect figures, on the theory that it was the logical connection of the concepts, not the figure, that was essential.”

— Ernst Mach

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

— Ernst Mach

22. “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

23. “Archimedes constructing his circle pays with his life for his defective biological adaptation to immediate circumstances.”

— Ernst Mach

24. “What Mach calls a thought experiment is of course not an experiment at all. At bottom it is a grammatical investigation.”

— Ernst Mach

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

— Ernst Mach

26. “The mathematician who pursues his studies without clear views of this matter, must often have the uncomfortable feeling that his paper and pencil surpass him in intelligence.”

— Ernst Mach

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “The acquisition of the most elementary truth does not devolve upon the individual alone: it is pre-effected in the development of the race.”

— Ernst Mach

32. “Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.”

— Ernst Mach

33. “Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.”

— Ernst Mach

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

— Ernst Mach

35. “All this, the positive and physical essence of mechanics, which makes its chief and highest interest for a student of nature, is in existing treatises completely buried and concealed beneath a mass of technical considerations.”

— Ernst Mach

36. “To us investigators, the concept ‘soul’ is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.”

— Ernst Mach