The sacred formula of positivism: love as a principle, the order as a foundation, and progress as a goal.
Nothing is destroyed until it is replaced.
Religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education.
Know yourself to improve yourself.
Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to human kind is that if science grounded in observation.
To reorganize society without God or King, by the systematic culture of Humanity.
The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.
Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.
Woman is the most moral element in all humanity.
Everything is relative; and only that is absolute.
Every science consists in the coordination of facts; if the different observations were entirely isolated, there would be no science.
If we do not allow free thinking in chemistry or biology, why should we allow it in morals or politics?
All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but that which is based on observed facts. This is incontestable, in our present advanced stage; but, if we look back to the primitive stage of human knowledge, we shall see that it must have been otherwise then. If it is true that every theory must be based upon observed facts, it is equally true that facts cannot be observed without the guidance of some theory. Without such guidance, our facts would be desultory and fruitless; we could not retain them: for the most part we could not even perceive them.
To understand a science it is necessary to know its history.
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.
Humanity is always made up of more dead than living.
The dead govern the living.
Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.
Induction for deduction, with a view to construction.
In mathematics we find the primitive source of rationality; and to mathematics must the biologists resort for means to carry out their researches.
But now, I, August Comte, have discovered the truth. Therefore, there is no longer any need for freedom of thought or freedom of the press. I want to rule and to organize the whole country.
Foreknowledge is power.
C'este donc par l'étude des mathématiques, et seulement par elle, que l'on peut se faire une idée juste et approfondie de ce que c'est qu'une science.
All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.
Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.
