Michael Faraday - Collected Quotes

"[…] it is always safe and philosophic to distinguish, as much as is in our power, fact from theory [...]" (Michael Faraday, "A Speculation Touching Electric Conduction and the Nature of Matter", Philosophical Magazine Vol. XXIV, 1844)

"How wonderful it is to me the simplicity of nature when we rightly interpret her laws and how different the convictions which they produce on the mind in comparison with the uncertain conclusions which hypothesis or even theory present." (Michael Faraday, [letter to Svanberg] 1850)

 "Hypotheses, treated as mere poetic fancies in one age, scouted as scientific absurdities in the next - preparatory only to their being altogether forgotten - have often, when least expected, received confirmation from indirect channels, and, at length, become finally adopted as tenets, deducible from the sober exercise of induction." (Michael Faraday, "The Subject Matter of a Course of Six Lectures on the Non-Metallic Elements", 1853)

"[…] in the pursuit of physical science, the imagination should be taught to present the subject investigated in all possible and even impossible views […]" (Michael Faraday, "Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics", 1859)

 "The world little knows how many of the thoughts and theories which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been crushed in silence and secrecy; that in the most successful instances not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary conclusions have been realized." (Michael Faraday, "The Forces of Matter", 1860)

"As an experimentalist, I feel bound to let experiment guide me into any train of thought which it may justify; being satisfied that experiment, like analysis, must lead to strict truth if rightly interpreted; and believing also that it is in its nature far more suggestive of new trains of thought and new conditions of natural power." (Michael Faraday)

"I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life." (Michael Faraday)

"Let the imagination go, guiding it by judgment and principle but holding it in and directing it by experiment." (Michael Faraday)

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature, and in such things as these, experiment is the best test of such consistency." (Michael Faraday)

"[Science] teaches us to be neglectful of nothing, not to despise the 

small beginnings [...] for the small often contains the great in princi￾ple, as the great does the small." (Michael Faraday)

"The more we can enlarge the number of anomalous facts and consequences the better it will be for the subject; for they can only remain anomalies to us while we continue in error." (Michael Faraday)

"The truth of science has ever had not merely the task of evolving herself from the dull and uniform mist of ignorance, but also that of the repressing and dissolving the phantoms of the imagination." (Michael Faraday)