The duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads.
Scientists
Ibn al-Haytham
Arab mathematician and physicist born in 965 in Basra who founded modern optics by proving that vision results from light entering the eye, not rays emanating from it. A pioneer of the scientific method.
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Ibn al-Haytham's Other Quotes
The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them.
Truth is sought for its own sake. And those who are engaged upon the quest for anything for its own sake are not interested in other things.
Related Quotes
In nature nothing exists alone.
-- Rachel Carson
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
-- Rachel Carson
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
-- Charles Darwin
The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them.
-- Ibn al-Haytham
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
-- Grace Hopper
The most dangerous phrase in the language is: 'We've always done it this way.'
-- Grace Hopper