Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.
The paradox of knowledge is not confined to the small, atomic scale; on the contrary, it is as cogent on the scale of man, and even of the stars.
It is very much easier to divide your outlook on the world into two halves, to say that you know this belongs to the daily half and this belongs to the Sunday half.
Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.
The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.
Satire is not a social dynamite. But it is a social indicator: it shows that new men are knocking at the door.
The force that makes the winter grow Its feathered hexagons of snow, and drives the bee to match at home Their calculated honeycomb, Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind, A sense that under thing and wing Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring .
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.