It is a common failing-and one that I have myself suffered from-to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.

I regret my disbelief in God.

Twice in my life I have spent two weary and scientifically profitless years seeking evidence to corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists-days of leaden gray skies bringing with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy.

There is much else in the literary idiom of nature-philosophy: nothing-buttery, for example, always part of the minor symptomatology of the bogus.

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.