I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
— William Harvey
Moderate labor of the body conduces to the preservation of health, and cares many initial diseases.
— William Harvey
I have often wondered and even laughed at those who fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge.
— William Harvey
When in many dissections, carried out as opportunity offered upon living animals, I first addressed my mind to seeing how I could discover the function and offices of the heart’s movement in animals through the use of my own eyes instead of through the books and writings of others, I kept finding the matter so truly hard and beset with difficulties that I all but thought, with Fracastoro, that the heart’s movement had been understood by God alone.
— William Harvey
Nature is a volume of which God is the author.
— William Harvey
For the concept of a circuit of the blood does not destroy, but rather advances traditional medicine.
— William Harvey
Very many maintain that all we know is still infinitely less than all that still remains unknown; nor do philosophers pin their faith to others’ precepts in such wise that they lose their liberty, and cease to give credence to the conclusions of their proper senses. Neither do they swear such fealty to their mistress Antiquity that they openly, and in sight of all, deny and desert their friend Truth.
— William Harvey
It is, however, an argument of no weight to say that natural bodies are first generated or compounded out of those things into which they are at the last broken down or dissolved.
— William Harvey
The animal’s heart is the basis of its life, its chief member, the sun of its microcosm; on the heart all its activity depends, from the heart all its liveliness and strength arise. Equally is the king the basis of his kingdoms, the sun of his microcosm, the heart of the state; from him all power arises and all grace stems.
— William Harvey
Harvey was not content merely to gather knowledge; he digested and arranged it under the guidance of the faculties which compare and reason. … Harvey appears to have possessed, in a remarkable degree, the power of persuading and conciliating those with whom he came in contact. In the whole course of his long life we hear nothing either of personal enemies or personal enmities … one of the great men whom God, in virtue of his eternal laws, bids to appear on earth from time to time to enlighten, and to ennoble mankind.
— William Harvey
And so I conclude that blood lives and is nourished of itself and in no way depends on any other part of the body as being prior to it or more excellent… So that from this we may perceive the causes not only of life in general… but also of longer or shorter life, of sleeping and waking, of skill, of strength and so forth.
— William Harvey
Memory cannot exist without endurance of the things perceived, and the thing perceived cannot remain where it has never been.
— William Harvey
Good God! how should the mitral valves prevent the regurgitation of air and not of blood?
— William Harvey
There is no science which does not spring from pre-existing knowledge, and no certain and definite idea which has not derived its origin from the senses.
— William Harvey
We, however, maintain … that all animals whatsoever, even the viviparous, and man himself not excepted, are produced from ova; that the first conception, from which the foetus proceeds in all, is an ovum of one description or another, as well as the seeds of all kinds of plants.
— William Harvey
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