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.
I grew up to be indifferent to the distinction between literature and science, which in my teens were simply two languages for experience that I learned together.
The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well. And having done it well, he loves to do it better.
There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
The largest single step in the ascent of man is the change from nomad to village agriculture.
The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.
It’s a sort of curious phenomenon that God is somehow not quite as nice as the devil; the devil doesn’t punish you for behaving well, but God punishes you for behaving badly.
The human baby, the human being, is a mosaic of animal and angel.
It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.
A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.
To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.