Robert Boyle Quotes

God would not have made the universe as it is unless he intended us to understand it. Sound consists of an undulating motion of the air. He whose faith never doubted, may just lay doubt of his faith. Nature always looks out for the preservation of the universe. From a knowledge of his work, we shall know him. Even when we find not what we seek, we find something as well worth seeking as what we missed. God is the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion. As the moon, though darkened with spots, gives us a much greater light than the stars that sown all luminous, so do the scriptures afford more light than the brightest human authors. In them the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance. The gospel comprises indeed, and unfolds, the whole mystery of man's redemption, as far forth as it is necessary to be known for our salvation. There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought. As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying. The book of nature is a fine and large piece of tapestry rolled up, which we are not able to see all at once, but must be content to wait for the discovery of its beauty, and symmetry, little by little, as it gradually comes to be more and more unfolded, or displayed. In the Bible the ignorant may learn all requisite knowledge, and the most knowing may learn to discern their ignorance. Darkness, that here surrounds our purblind understanding, will vanish at the dawning of eternal day. And when with excellent microscopes I discern in otherwise invisible objects the inimitable subtlety of nature's curious workmanship, and when, in a word, by the help of anatomical knives, and the light of chemical furnaces, I study the book of nature, and consult the glosses of Aristotle, Epicurus, Paracelsus, Harvey, Helmont, and other learned expositors of that instructive volume, I find myself oftentimes reduct to exclaim with the psalmist, How manifold are thy works, O Lord! In wisdom hast thou made them all. I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters. I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature. I use the scriptures, not as an arsenal to be resorted to only for arms and weapons, but as a matchless temple, where I delight to be, to contemplate the beauty, the symmetry, and the magnificence of the structure, and to increase my awe, and excite my devotion to the deity there preached and adored. Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds, though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay. Our Savior would love at no less wraith than death, and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased himself to the sufferance of the extremist of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme. Well, I see I am not designed to the finding out the philosopher's stone, I have been so unlucky in my first attempts in chemistry. Exalt your passion by directing and settling it upon an object the due contemplation of whose loveliness may cure perfectly all hurts received from mortal beauty. The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their senses that, because the air is indivisible, they ascribe but little to it. And think it but one removed from nothing. And, to prevent mistakes, I must advertise you, that I now mean by elements, as those chemists that speak plainest do by their principles, certain primitive or simple, or perfectly unmingled bodies, which not being made of any other bodies, or of one another, are the ingredients of which all those called perfectly mixed bodies are immediately compounded, and into which they are ultimately resolved. Now whether there be any such body to be constantly met with in all, and each, of those that are said to be element bodies, is the thing I now question. He that said it was not good for man to be alone, placed the celibate amongst the inferior states of perfection. God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes. I think myself obliged, whatever my private apprehensions may be of the success, to do my duty, and leave events to their disposer. He that condescended so far, and stooped so low, to invite and bring us to heaven, will not refuse us a gracious reception there, that there is a spring, or elastical power in the air we live in, by which epsilon lambda alpha tau nu rho l at r or spring of the air, that which I mean is this, that our air either consists of, or at least abounds with, parts of such a nature, that in case they be bent or compressed by the weight of the incumbent part of the atmosphere, or by any other body, they do endeavor, as much as in them lies, to free themselves from that pressure, by bearing against the contiguous bodies that keep them bent. It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chemists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning. But the world being once frammed, and the course of nature established, the naturalist, except in some few cases, where God, or incorporeal agents interpose, has recourse to the first cause but for its general and ordinary support and influence, whereby it preserves matter and motion from annihilation or desition, and in explicating particular phenomena, considers only the size, shape, motion, or want of it, texture, and the resulting qualities and attributes of the small particles of matter. In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenseless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a part. It is not strange to me that persons of the fair sex should like, in all things about them, the handsomeness for which they find themselves most liked. The veneration, wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature, has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God. For many have not only looked upon it, as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt. The inspired and expired air may be sometimes very useful, by condensing and cooling the blood that passeth through the lungs, I hold that the depuration of the blood in that passage, is not only one of the ordinary, but one of the principal uses of respiration. I look upon a good physician, not so properly as a servant to nature, as one, that is a counselor and friendly assistant, who, in his patient's body, furthers those motions and other things, that he judges conducive to the welfare and recovery of it, but as to those, that he perceives likely to be hurtful, either by increasing the disease, or otherwise endangering the patient, he thinks it is his part to oppose or hinder, though nature do manifestly enough seem to endeavor the exercising or, carrying on those hurtful motions. And let me add, that he that throughly understands the nature of ferments and fermentations, shall probably be much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of diverse phenomena of several diseases, as well fevers and others, which will perhaps be never throughly understood, without an insight into the doctrine of fermentation. If the juices of the body were more chemically examined, especially by a naturalist, that knows the ways of making fixed bodies volatile, and volatile fixed, and knows the power of the open air in promoting the former of those operations, it is not improbable, that both many things relating to the nature of the humors, and to the ways of sweetening, actuating, and otherwise altering them, may be detected, and the importance of such discoveries may be discerned. Acid salts have the power of destroying the blueness of the infusion of our wood lignum nephriticum, and those liquors indiscriminately that abound with sulfurous salts, under which I comprehend the uranus and volatile salts of animal substances, and the alkalisate or fixed salts that are made by incineration, have the virtue of restoring it.