Robert Boyle Quotes - Page 2

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

Exalt your passion by directing and settling it upon an object the due con-templation of whose loveliness may cure perfectly all hurts received from mortal beauty.

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 look'd upon it, as an impossible thing to compass, but as something impious to attempt.

That there is a Spring, or Elastical power in the Air we live in. By which ελατνρ [elater] 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 compress'd by the weight of the incumbent part of the Atmosphere, or by any other Body, they do endeavour, 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 chymists and the mechanical philosophers who have hitherto been too little acquainted with one another's learning.

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.

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

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.

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.

And, to prevent mistakes, I must advertize you, that I now mean by elements, as those chymists 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 mixt 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 elemented bodies, is the thing I now question.

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.

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.

And let me adde, 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 divers Phænomena of severall diseases (as well Feavers and others) which will perhaps be never throughly understood, without an insight into the doctrine of Fermentation.