[Quotes] Quotes of Alessandro Volta

You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong. What is it possible to do well, in physics particularly, if things are not reduced to degrees and measures? The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning facts can destroy our ratiocination not vice versa. Each metal has a certain power, which is different from metal to metal, of setting the electric fluid in motion. I continue coupling a plate of silver with one of zinc, and always in the same order, and place between each of these couples a moissan disk. I continue to form a column, if the column contains about 20 of these couples of metal, it will be capable of giving to the fingers several small shocks. This loss strikes me so much to heart that I do not think I shall ever have another happy day. My father owned nothing except a small dwelling worth about 14,000 lira and he left behind him 17,000 lira of debt I was actually poorer and poorer. Heroes of physics, Argonauts of our time who leapt the mountains, who crossed the seas, you have confirmed in uncomfortable places what Newton knew without leaving his study. In fact, no opinion should be with fervor. No one holds with fervor that 7 by 8 equals 56 because it can be shown to be the case. Fervor is only necessary in commanding an opinion which is doubtful or demonstrably false. If you have seen with your own eyes a mountain move forward in a plane, that is, a huge rock of this mountain breaking off and covering entire fields, a whole castle sunken into the earth. I am still of the same opinion because the impossibility of the formation of mountains by the sea is demonstrated to me. In the beginning of the year 1800 the illustrious professor conceived the idea of forming a long column by piling up, in succession, a disc of copper, a disc of zinc, and a disc of wet cloth, with scrupulous attention to not changing this order.