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Christiaan Huygens
(14 Apr 1629 - 8 Jul 1695)

Dutch physicist and astronomer.


Science Quotes by Christiaan Huygens (4)

...great difficulties are felt at first and these cannot be overcome except by starting from experiments .. and then be conceiving certain hypotheses ... But even so, very much hard work remains to be done and one needs not only great perspicacity but often a degree of good fortune.
— Christiaan Huygens
Letter to Tschirnhaus (1687). Quoted in Archana Srinivasan, Great Inventors (2007), 37-38.
See also:  |  Difficulty (16)  |  Experiment (183)  |  Hypothesis (76)  |  Luck (13)  |  Scientific Method (59)

I believe that we do not know anything for certain, but everything probably.
— Christiaan Huygens
Letter to Pierre Perrault, 'Sur la préface de M. Perrault de son traité de l'Origine des fontaines' [1763], Oeuvres Complètes de Christiaan Huygens (1897), Vol. 7, 298. Quoted in Jacques Roger, The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson and trans. Robert Ellrich (1997), 163.
See also:  |  Certainty (22)  |  Knowledge (318)  |  Probable (4)

I esteem his understanding and subtlety highly, but I consider that they have been put to ill use in the greater part of his work, where the author studies things of little use or when he builds on the improbable principle of attraction.
Writing about Newton's Principia. Huygens had some time earlier indicated he did not believe the theory of universal gravitation, saying it 'appears to me absurd.'
— Christiaan Huygens
Quoted in Archana Srinivasan, Great Inventors (2007), 37.
See also:  |  Attraction (3)  |  Gravitation (5)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (80)  |  Understanding (94)

One may conceive light to spread successively, by spherical waves.
— Christiaan Huygens
Attributed.
See also:  |  Light (33)  |  Wave (13)



Quotes by others about Christiaan Huygens (1)

The Commonwealth of Learning is not at this time without Master-Builders, whose mighty Designs, in advancing the Sciences, will leave lasting Monuments to the Admiration of Posterity; But every one must not hope to be a Boyle, or a Sydenham; and in an Age that produces such Masters, as the Great-Huygenius, and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some other of that Strain; 'tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer in clearing Ground a little, and removing some of the Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Edited by Peter Nidditch (1975), The Epistle to the Reader, 9-10.
See also:  |  Ambition (7)  |  Robert Boyle (21)  |  Knowledge (318)  |  Learning (43)  |  Sir Isaac Newton (80)  |  Posterity (3)


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