Robert Boyle Quotes

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

Acid Salts have the Power of Destroying the Blewness of the Infusion of our Wood [lignum nephreticum], and those Liquors indiscriminatly that abound with Sulphurous Salts, (under which I comprehend the Urinous and Volatile Salts of Animal Substances, and the Alcalisate or fixed Salts that are made by Incineration) have the virtue of Restoring it.

I think myself obliged, whatever my private apprehensions may be of the success, to do my duty, and leave events to their Disposer.

God would not have made the universe as it is unless He intended us to understand it.

God [is] the author of the universe, and the free establisher of the laws of motion.

From a knowledge of His work, we shall know Him.

He was careful to instruct him in such an affable, kind, and gentle way, that he easily prevailed with him to consider studying, not so much as a duty of obedience to his superiors, but as the way to purchase for himself a most delightsom and invaluable good. In effect, he soon created in Philaretus so strong a passion to acquire knowledge, that what time he could spare from a scholar's task, which his retentive memory made him not find uneasy, he would usually employ so greedily in reading, that his master would sometimes be necessitated to force him out to play, on which, and upon study, he looked, as if their natures were inverted.

He that said it was not good for man to be alone, placed the celibate amongst the inferior states of perfection.

I look upon a good physician, not so properly as a servant to nature, as one, that is a counsellor 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 endeavour the exercising or carrying on those hurtful motions.

God may rationally be supposed to have framed so great and admirable an automaton as the world for special ends and purposes.

Sound consists of an undulating motion of the air.

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.

If the juices of the body were more chymically 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 humours, and to the ways of sweetening, actuating, and otherwise altering them, may be detected, and the importance of such discoveries may be discerned.

In an arch each single stone which, if severed from the rest, would be perhaps defenceless is sufficiently secured by the solidity and entireness of the whole fabric, of which it is a part.

Nature always looks out for the preservation of the universe.

But the World being once fram'd, and the course of Nature establish'd, 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 onely the Size, Shape, Motion, (or want of it) Texture, and the resulting Qualities and Attributes of the small particles of Matter.

He that condescended so far, and stooped so low, to invite and bring us to heaven, will not refuse us a gracious reception there.

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.

And I might add the confidence with which distracted persons do oftentimes, when they are awake, think, they see black fiends in places, where there is no black object in sight without them.

The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks ... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer.

It is my intent to beget a good understanding between the chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning.

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.

Our Saviour would love at no less rate than death; and from the supereminent height of glory, stooped and debased Himself to the sufferance of the extremest of indignities, and sunk himself to the bottom of abjectness, to exalt our condition to the contrary extreme.

He whose faith never doubted, may justly doubt of his faith.