Joseph Priestley Quotes

#1. What I have known with respect to myself, has tended much to lessen both my admiration, and my contempt, of others.

Joseph Priestley

#2. Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.

Joseph Priestley

#3. This is unfortunately a world in which things find it difficult, frequently impossible, to live up to their names.

Joseph Priestley

#4. Too many christians have been chargeable with ... confounding the Logos of Plato with that of John , and making of it a second person in the trinity, than which no two things can be more different.

Joseph Priestley

#5. It is hardly possible not to suspect the truth of this doctrine of atonement, when we consider that the general maxims to which it may be reduced, are nowhere laid down, or asserted, in the Scriptures, but others quite contrary to them.

Joseph Priestley

#6. When we say there is a GOD, we mean that there is an intelligent designing cause of what we see in the world around us, and a being who was himself uncaused.

Joseph Priestley

#7. In all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of time, which are slow and sure, than to take those of synods, which are often hasty and injudicious

Joseph Priestley

#8. Had Mr. Gibbon lived in France, Spain, or Italy, he might with the fame reason have ranked the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the worship of saints and angels among the essentials of Christianity, as the doctrines of the trinity and of the atonement.

Joseph Priestley

#9. Will is nothing more than a particular case of the general doctrine of association of ideas, and therefore a perfectly mechanical thing.

Joseph Priestley

#10. In completing one discovery we never fail to get an imperfect knowledge of others of which we could have no idea before, so that we cannot solve one doubt without creating several new ones.

Joseph Priestley

#11. But it is not given to every electrician to die in so glorious a manner as the justly envied Richmann.
[G. W. Richmann died from being hit by lightning, which he had been investigating.]

Joseph Priestley

#12. The more elaborate our means of our common sense is, the less the common sense it becomes.

Joseph Priestley

#13. To me there is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.

Joseph Priestley

#14. The wisdom of one generation will be folly in the next.

Joseph Priestley

#15. I have procured air [oxygen] ... between five and six times as good as the best common air that I have ever met with.

Joseph Priestley

#16. Could we have entered into the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, and have traced all the steps by which he produced his great works, we might see nothing very extraordinary in the process.

Joseph Priestley

#17. From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices.

Joseph Priestley