Daily Inspiration Quote by Claude Bernard

Bernard’s line lands with the cool authority of someone trying to civilize a chaotic space: the laboratory, where wishful thinking can masquerade as discovery. The overcoat metaphor is deceptively domestic. Imagination isn’t framed as an enemy of science, but as something you manage, like outerwear - useful for travel, inappropriate for certain rooms, and dangerous if you forget you’re still wearing it. That practical image is the point: he’s selling self-discipline as a daily habit, not a lofty virtue.

The subtext is a warning about a scientist’s most flattering vice: falling in love with your own explanation. In the lab, Bernard argues, imagination becomes a contaminant. It sneaks into interpretation, nudges you toward confirming what you hoped to find, and turns messy results into a “story” that reads better than it tests. By telling you to “put off” imagination, he’s really asking you to suspend narrative hunger - the urge to force coherence before the data earns it.

Then he gives imagination its dignity back. Put it on again when you leave. Outside the lab, you need speculation to form hypotheses, connect disparate observations, and decide what questions are worth the trouble. This is a blueprint for a two-step epistemology: rigor in measurement, freedom in meaning-making.

Context matters: Bernard was a foundational figure in experimental physiology in 19th-century France, writing at a moment when medicine was fighting to become a method, not a tradition. (He’s often mislabeled a “psychologist.”) The quote is a cultural argument for modern scientific identity: be creative, but only on a leash.