experiment quotes

Those who have handled scienceshave been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant; they only collect and use; thereasonersresemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance.But the bee takes a middle course; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.

- Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
  Novum Organum bk.1, aphorism 95.

It was an experiment, and I think a successful one, in communal living. It worked largely because Auden ran it; he was exceptionally adept at getting the necessary money out of us when it was due.

- Paul Frederick Bowles
  On an artist's house in NewYork. Without Stopping:  An Autobiography, ch.12.

Theory is a good thing but a good experiment lasts forever.

- Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa
  Experiment, Theory, Practice.

We must trust to nothing but facts. These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive.We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

- Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
  Traite   e l e  mentaire de la chimie ('Elements of Chemistry', translated by Robert Kerr).

Pure poetry is pure experiment†memorable nonsense.

- George Sandys
Quoted in Helen Gardner (ed) The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1991).

There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  'AVindication of Natural Diet'.