Quotes by Vladimir Vernadski

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I am fully aware of the fact that I can get excited about something false, deceptive, go down a path that will lead me into the jungle, but I can't not go down this path, I hate all the shackles of my thinking, I can't and I don't want to I force her to follow the important path from a practical point of view, but which will not allow me to understand even a little more deeply those problems that torment me... And this search, this desire is the foundation of all scientific activity.

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Scientists are as imaginative as artists; they are not masters of their ideas; they can work well for a long time only on that thing to which their mind is inclined, on that thing which stirs their feelings. In their minds, ideas change one with another, appear among the most impossible, often crazy; they swarm, spin, merge, shine. And because of these ideas, they live and work in the name of these ideas.

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The struggle between the scientific worldview and the philosophical and religious conceptions alien to it, even if they are clearly opposed to the dominant scientific ideas, is difficult, persistent and erroneous, because of the probability of error. Because philosophy and religion are closely related to those powers, deeper than logic, of the human soul, whose influence strongly affects the perception of logical conclusions, their understanding.

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It is time to get rid of this narrow Christian division between spirit and flesh. The true spiritual life, the true ideational side of life, consists precisely in the use of the best parts of both body and spirit.

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The victory of some scientific opinion and its inclusion in the worldview still does not automatically prove its veracity. Many times, it happens the other way around. Scientific truth develops along a complicated and circuitous route, and not just any kind of scientific worldview can serve to express it.

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A scientific hypothesis is always beyond the limits of the facts that constitute the basis for its construction.

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Just as Christianity did not overcome science in its own territory, but defined its own essence better in this confrontation, so science, in a foreign territory, will not succeed in defeating the Christian religion or any other, but its will identify and clarify its forms of reference.

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For scientific development, it is necessary to recognize the full freedom of a personality, of the personal spirit, because only with this condition is a scientific vision of the world replaced by another, created by the free and independent work of a personality.

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It is said that the natural sciences have increased the power of man, given him an unknown strength. Rather, they brought nature down to the level of man, created the possibility of foreseeing its smallness and intuiting that after due investigation it will prove to be of the same kind as human nature.

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The whole history of science shows at every turn that some personalities were more right in their assertions than entire corporations of scientists and than hundreds of thousands of researchers who adhered to the prevailing opinions... The truth often shows itself in a greater extent to these heretics of science than to the representatives of orthodox scientific thought. Of course, not all groups and individuals outside the scientific worldview have this great foresight into the future of human thought, but only some, a few. But the real people with a genuine scientific worldview are always to be found in these groups and individuals who sit on the fringes, among the heretics of science, and not among the representatives of the dominant scientific view. To distinguish these from those who are in error is not the business of contemporaries.

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In any system of philosophy the state of mind of its creator is obviously reflected.

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In the historical development of mankind the importance of the mystical state - of inspiration - can never be overestimated. In one form or another, inspiration permeates the entire spiritual life of man, being the basic element of life.