Auguste Comte Quotes

The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.

Know yourself to improve yourself.

Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.

Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.

Everything is relative; and only that is absolute.

Woman is the most moral element in all humanity.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

Foreknowledge is power.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.

To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity.

To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.

Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.

Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts; it is equally true that facts can not be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them.

The dead govern the living.

Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.

The universe displays no proof of an all-directing mind.

But now, I, August Comte, have discovered the truth. Therefore, there is no longer any need for freedom of thought or freedom of the press. I want to rule and to organize the whole country.

The word right should be excluded from political language, as the word cause from the language of philosophy.

The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions-each branch of our knowledge-passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious: the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

The heavens declare the glory of Kepler and Newton.