Life & Wisdom Quote by Martin H. Fischer

A little provocation dressed up as common sense: Fischer is warning you not to confuse “unproven” with “untrue.” The phrase “empiric truth” is a quiet rebuke to intellectual gatekeeping, the kind that treats the laboratory as the sole border control for reality. He’s not anti-science so much as anti-scientism: the habit of granting legitimacy only to what has been formally measured, published, and replicated on cue.

The line works because it flips the prestige hierarchy. “Practice” is usually framed as messy, biased, anecdotal; “the laboratory” as clean, objective, final. Fischer reverses that confidence: life is the larger experiment, and the lab is often late to the party. “Never found proof” also has a sly asymmetry. It doesn’t mean proof doesn’t exist; it means the institution tasked with finding it hasn’t succeeded yet. The subtext is epistemic humility: methods have limits, and absence of evidence can be a lagging indicator, not a verdict.

Context matters. Fischer lived through an era when modern medicine and experimental physiology were rapidly professionalizing, tightening standards of proof while clinical practice kept encountering stubborn, effective folkways and emergent therapies ahead of theory. His point isn’t to license quackery; it’s to defend curiosity about outcomes, especially when mechanisms are unclear. The best science, he implies, begins by taking “it works” seriously enough to ask why, rather than dismissing it as embarrassment to the model.