There are three creative ideas which, each in its turn, have been central to science. They are the idea of order, the idea of causes, and the idea of chance.
Knowledge is not a loose-leaf notebook of facts. Above all, it is a responsibility for the integrity of what we are, primarily of what we are as ethical creatures.
It is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual.
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.
Knowledge is not a loose leaf notebook of facts.
All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses.
The painter’s portrait and the physicist’s explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet’s mind, or the painter’s, or the scientist’s, but of the mind of man.
Progress is the exploration of our own error.
A theory in its day helps to solve the problems of the day.
I call that brilliant sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man.
Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker’s.
There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that :;:;:;:;:;:; We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.
Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.
One original thought is worth the sum total of human knowledge, because it advances the sum total of human knowledge by that one original thought.
Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.
The basis for poetry and scientific discovery is the ability to comprehend the unlike in the like and the like in the unlike.
A genius is a man who has two great ideas.
One aim of physical sciences had been to give an exact picture the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
We gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding her laws.