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.

We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye ... The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.

Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

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 richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay...

Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.

There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.