Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.
Interpretation
Science progresses through mistakes that ultimately lead to greater truths.
This quote by Jules Verne emphasizes the idea that scientific advancement often involves making errors. Each mistake serves as a stepping stone toward a more accurate understanding of the truth, illustrating the iterative nature of scientific discovery where failure is not just an obstacle, but a valuable part of the learning process.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation about the scientific method to illustrate the value of learning from mistakes.
Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world.
It is always a vulgar and often an unhealthy pastime, and it is a vice which does not go alone; the man who gambles will find himself capable of any evil.
Nothing can astound an American. It has often been asserted that the word 'impossible' is not a French one. People have evidently been deceived by the dictionary. In America, all is easy, all is simple; and as for mechanical difficulties, they are overcome before they arise.
However strong, however imposing a ship may appear, it is not 'disgraced' because it flies before the tempest. A commander ought always to remember that a man's life is worth more than the mere satisfaction of his own pride. In any case, to be obstinate is blameable, and to be wilful is dangerous.
The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery.
Nothing is more dreadful than private duels in America. The two adversaries attack each other like wild beasts. Then it is that they might well covet those wonderful properties of the Indians of the prairies - their quick intelligence, their ingenious cunning, their scent of the enemy.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification-judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind-essentially sum up the aim and method of modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter has destroyed geometry.
Human societies vary in lots of independent factors affecting their openness to innovation.
Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.
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