When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.

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.

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, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

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

Science is a tribute to what we can know, although we are fallible.

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.