Alessandro Volta Quotes: From the Inventor of Electric Battery

The best quotes by Alessandro Volta are the following:

1. “This loss strikes me so much to heart that I do not think I shall ever have another happy day.” (After his son’s death)
2. “You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong.”
3. “Keep in mind to be kind.”
4. “My father owned nothing except a small dwelling worth about fourteen thousand lire, and he left behind him seventeen thousand lire of debt; I was actually poorer and poorer.”
5. “Each metal has a certain power, which is different from metal to metal, of setting the electric fluid in motion.”
6. “What is it possible to do well, in physics particularly, if things are not reduced to degrees and measures?”
7. “I continue coupling a plate of silver with one of zinc, and always in the same order… and place between each of these couples a moistened disk. I continue to form a column. If the column contains about twenty of these couples of metals, it will be capable of giving to the fingers several small shocks.”
8. “In fact, no opinion should be with fervor. No one holds with fervor that 7 x 8 = 56 because it can be shown to be the case. Fervor is only necessary in commending an opinion which is doubtful or demonstrably false.”
9. “Heroes of physics, argonauts of our time who leaped the mountains, who crossed the seas … You have confirmed in uncomfortable places what Newton knew without leaving his study.”
10. “Bonaparte was in good humor, at ease and gracious, and the conversation lasted more than an hour and a half. I, myself, joking aside, am amazed how my old and new discoveries of the so-called galvanism, which show them to be only pure and simple electricity caused by the contact of metals, could have produced so much excitement. Objectively regarded, I find them also of some importance, they certainly throw new light on the theory of electricity. They open a new field for chemical research and also offer applications to medicine. For a year or more the journals of Germany, France and England have been full of discussions about them. Here in Paris, this is the current excitement where, as in other things, there is added the excitement of fashion.” (From a letter to his brother)
11. “The language of experiment is more authoritative than any reasoning: facts can destroy our ratiocination—not vice versa.”
12. “If you have seen with your own eyes a mountain move forward in a plain; that is, a huge rock of this mountain’ breaking off and covering entire fields; a whole castle sunken into the earth.”
13. “I am still of the same opinion because the impossibility of the formation of mountains by the sea is demonstrated to me.”
14. “At the beginning of the year 1800, the illustrious professor conceived the idea of forming a long column by piling up, in succession, a disc of copper, a disc of zinc, and a disc of wet cloth, with scrupulous attention to not changing this order.”