The presentations and conceptions of the average man of the world are formed and dominated, not by the full and pure desire for knowledge as an end in itself, but by the struggle to adapt himself favourably to the conditions of life.

Ernst Mach

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

Ernst Mach

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Ernst Mach

The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.

Ernst Mach

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

Ernst Mach

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

Ernst Mach

Personally, people know themselves very poorly.

Ernst Mach

If our dreams were more regular, more connected, more stable, they would also have more practical importance for us.

Ernst Mach

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Ernst Mach

Without renouncing the support of physics, it is possible for the physiology of the senses, not only to pursue its own course of development, but also to afford to physical science itself powerful assistance.

Ernst Mach

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Ernst Mach

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

Ernst Mach