Humphry Davy Quotes About Progress

• We can trace back our existence almost to a point. Former time presents us with trains of thoughts gradually diminishing to nothing. But our ideas of futurity are perpetually expanding. Our desires and our hopes, even when modified by our fears, seem to grasp at immensity. This alone would be sufficient to prove the progressiveness of our nature, and that this little earth is but a point from which we start toward a perfection of being.

  →

  Humphry Davy

  "emoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy". Book by John Davy, p. 130, 1836.

  3653

• The beginning of civilisation is the discovery of some useful arts, by which men acquire property, comforts, or luxuries. The necessity or desire of preserving them leads to laws and social institutions. The discovery of peculiar arts gives superiority to particular nations ... to subjugate other nations, who learn their arts, and ultimately adopt their manners;- so that in reality the origin as well as the progress and improvement of civil society is founded in mechanical and chemical inventions.

  →

  Humphry Davy

  Art  

  Sir Humphry Davy (1840). “Salmonia: or, Days of fly-fishing; in a series of conversations: with some account of the habits of fishes belonging to the genus Salmo. Consolation in travel, or, The last days of a philosopher”, p.351

  3112

• Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

  →

  Humphry Davy

  2030

You May Also Like:

Elihu Thomson

Dmitri Mendeleev

Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

Jons Jacob Berzelius

William Gilbert

Carl Wilhelm Scheele

Samuel Morse

Antoine Lavoisier