Willis R. Whitney famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

In the advance of civilization, it is new knowledge which paves the way, and the pavement is eternal.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Knowledge #Civilization #Way
Research is appreciation.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Appreciation #Research
The valuable attributes of research men are conscious ignorance and active curiosity.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Ignorance #Men #Curiosity
Somebody is always reflectively monkeying with some of the parts of an infinite universe - monkeying as distinct from aping.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Infinite #Infinite Universe #Universe
A persistent and age-old instinct makes us want to wander Into regions yet untrod And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#God #Age #Want
Necessity is not the mother of invention. Knowledge and experiment are its parents. It sometimes happens that successful search is made for unknown materials to fill well-recognized and predetermined requirements. It more often happens that the acquirement of knowledge of the previously unknown properties of a material suggests its trial for some new use. These facts strongly indicate the value of knowledge of properties of materials and indicate a way for research.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Mother #Knowledge #Successful
Our immediate interests are after all of but small moment. It is what we do for the future, what we add to the sum of man's knowledge, that counts most. As someone has said, 'The individual withers and the world is more and more.' Man dies at 70, 80, or 90, or at some earlier age, but through his power of physical reproduction, and with the means that he has to transmit the results of effort to those who come after him, he may be said to be immortal.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Knowledge #Mean #Men
The regularity with which we conclude that further advances in a particular field are impossible seems equaled only by the regularity with which events prove that we are of too limited vision. And it always seems to be those who have the fullest opportunity to know who are the most limited in view. What, then, is the trouble? I think that one answer should be: we do not realize sufficiently that the unknown is absolutely infinite, and that new knowledge is always being produced.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Knowledge #Opportunity #Thinking
I happen to be a kind of monkey. I have a monkeylike curiosity that makes me want to feel, smell, and taste things which arouse my curiosity, then to take them apart. It was born in me. Not everybody is like that, but a scientific researchist should be. Any fool can show me an experiment is useless. I want a man who will try it and get something out of it.
-- Willis R. Whitney

#Men #Smell #Curiosity

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.
A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal.
If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.
Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
To justify God's ways to man.
The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.
It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.

Willis R. Whitney famous quotes

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