Know yourself to improve yourself.

Everything is relative; and only that is absolute.

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

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

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

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.

Every attempt to employ mathematical methods in the study of chemical questions must be considered profoundly irrational and contrary to the spirit of chemistry.... if mathematical analysis should ever hold a prominent place in chemistry -- an aberration which is happily almost impossible -- it would occasion a rapid and widespread degeneration of that science.