# Quote — Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics

> The comportment of terrestrial bodies with respect to the earth is reducible to the comportment of the earth with respect to the remote heavenly bodies. If we were to assert that we knew more of moving objects than this their... experimentally-given comportment with respect to the celestial bodies, we should render ourselves culpable of a falsity. When... we say, that a body preserves unchanged its direction and velocity in space, our assertion is... an abbreviated reference to the entire universe. ...[S]uch ...is permitted the original author [Newton, Descartes or Galileo] of the principle, because he knows... no difficulties stand in the way of carrying out its implied directions. But no remedy lies in his power, if difficulties of the kind mentioned present themselves; if, for example, the requisite, relatively fixed bodies are wanting.

- Author: [Ernst Mach](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ernst-mach.md)
- Book: [The Science of Mechanics](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ernst-mach/the-science-of-mechanics.md)
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- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/ernst-mach/the-science-of-mechanics/the-comportment-of-terrestrial

## More from this book

> [I]t is necessary to make a distinction between mechanical experience and mechanical science... If we carefully examine the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, we shall find there pictorial representations of many kinds of implements and mechanical contrivances... long before theory was dreamed of, implements, machines, mechanical experiences, and mechanical knowledge were abundant.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ernst-mach/the-science-of-mechanics/i-t-is-necessary.md)

> The questions here dealt with have occupied me since my earliest youth, when my interest for them was powerfully stimulated by the beautiful introductions of Lagrange to... his Analytic Mechanics, as well as by the lucid and lively tract of Jolly, Principien der Mechanik (...1852). If Duehring's estimable work, Kritische Geschichte der Principien der Mechanik (...1873), did not particularly influence me, it was that at the time of its appearance, my ideas had been... published. ...[T]he reader will... find many points of agreement between Dühring's criticisms and those here expressed.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ernst-mach/the-science-of-mechanics/the-questions-here.md)

> An instinctive, irreflective knowledge of the processes of nature will doubtless always precede the scientific, conscious apprehension, or investigation, of phenomena. The former is the outcome of the relation in which the processes of nature stand to the satisfaction of our wants.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ernst-mach/the-science-of-mechanics/an-instinctive-irreflective.md)