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.

That series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment is a different kind of evolution -- not biological, but cultural evolution . . . "The Ascent of Man.

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.

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.

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

We receive experience from nature in a series of messages. From these messages we extract a content of information: that is, we decode the messages in some way. And from this code of information we then make a basic vocabulary of concepts and a basic grammar of laws, which jointly describe the inner organization that nature translates into the happenings and the appearances we meet.