3 A man who is certain he is right is almost sure to be wrong.
4 There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.
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5 I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philosophy, but in every department of daily life.
10 There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.
11 I have far more confidence in the one man who works mentally and bodily at a matter than in the six who merely talk about it.
11 Bacon in his instruction tells us that the scientific student ought not to be as the ant, who gathers merely, nor as the spider who spins from her own bowels, but rather as the bee who both gathers and produces.
13 I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.
14 Who would not have been laughed at if he had said in 1800 that metals could be extracted from their ores by electricity or that portraits could be drawn by chemistry.
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15 Among those points of self-education which take up the form of mental discipline, there is one of great importance, and, moreover, difficult to deal with, because it involves an internal conflict, and equally touches our vanity and our ease. It consists in the tendency to deceive ourselves regarding all we wish for, and the necessity of resistance to these desires. It is impossible for any one who has not been constrained, by the course of his occupation and thoughts, to a habit of continual self-correction, to be aware of the amount of error in relation to judgment arising from this tendency. The force of the temptation which urges us to seek for such evidence and appearances as are in favour of our desires, and to disregard those which oppose them, is wonderfully great. In this respect we are all, more or less, active promoters of error. In place of practising wholesome self-abnegation, we ever make the wish the father to the thought: we receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us; whereas the very reverse is required by every dictate of common sense.
16 It is the great beauty of our science, chemistry, that advancement in it, whether in a degree great or small, instead of exhausting the subjects of research, opens the doors to further and more abundant knowledge, overflowing with beauty and utility.
17 I hope that in due time the chemists will justify their proceedings by some large generalisations deduced from the infinity of results which they have collected. For me I am left hopelessly behind and I will acknowledge to you that through my bad memory organic chemistry is to me a sealed book. Some of those here, Hofmann for instance, consider all this however as scaffolding, which will disappear when the structure is built. I hope the structure will be worthy of the labour. I should expect a better and a quicker result from the study of the powers of matter, but then I have a predilection that way and am probably prejudiced in judgment.
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Roman Marshanski is the founder of Humoropedia.com and former Hollywood actor. You can Google his name to see the list of his movies (or you can click on his name above this box to visit his personal website). He wrote thousands of pages of fiction. Some of that fictional writing is screenplays and a lot of it is comedic writing. So he completed two feature film screenplays and many shorter literary works, some of which are comedy. He did most of that writing during his film career as a Hollywood actor. He was the lead actor in Rebecca Cremona's Magdalena. Rebecca Cremona was Steven Spielberg's protege on Munich. So he has a deep understanding of the creative process and can be considered an authority on all things related to humor. Indeed, his screenplays contain a lot of humor. That's where his love for jokes started. Eventually, this love of jokes led Roman to the creation of Humoropedia.com, the wonderful home of funny jokes and witty puns. He thinks humor is something very good. If you also think so, please follow him on X now because he has a sense of humor.
