William Stanley Jevons

Quotes

• “When quite young I can remember I had no thought or wish of surpassing others. I was rather taken with a liking of little arts and bits of learning. My mother carefully fostered a liking for botany, giving me a small microscope and many books, which I yet have. Strange as it may seem, I now believe that botany and the natural system, by exercising discrimination of kinds, is the best of logical exercises. What I may do in logic is perhaps derived from that early attention to botany.”
• “I used to think I should like to be a bookbinder or bookseller it seemed to me a most delightful trade and I wished or thought of nothing better. More lately I thought I should be a minister, it seemed so serious and useful a profession, and I entered but little into the merits of religion and the duties of a minister. Every one dissuaded me from the notion, and before I arrived at any age to require a real decision, science had claimed me.”
• “I need hardly stay to demonstrate that facts are valueless unless connected and explained by a correct theory; that analogies are very dangerous grounds of inference, unless carefully founded on similar conditions; and that experience misleads if it be misinterpreted.”
• “Coal in truth stands not beside, but entirely above, all other commodities. It is the material source of the energy of the country—the universal aid—the factor in everything we do. With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of earlier times.”
• “It is very commonly urged, that the failing supply of coal will be met by new modes of using it efficiently and economically. ...It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”
• “Commerce is but a means to an end, the diffusion of civilization and wealth. To allow commerce to proceed until the source of civilization is weakened and overturned is like killing the goose to get the golden egg. Is the immediate creation of material wealth to be our only object?”

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Key facts

Born

( 1835-09-01 ) 1 September 1835, Liverpool , Lancashire , England

Died

13 August 1882 (1882-08-13) (aged 46), Bexhill-on-Sea , Sussex , England

Resting place

Hampstead Cemetery , London

Alma mater

University College London

Known for

Marginal utility theory , Jevons paradox

Children

Herbert Stanley Jevons

Fields

Economics , Logic

Institutions

University College London (1876–1880), Owens College (now University of Manchester ) (1863–1875)

Academic advisors

Augustus De Morgan

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image

William Stanley Jevons.jpg

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