The faith of scientists in the power and truth of mathematics is so implicit that their work has gradually become less and less observation, and more and more calculation.... But the facts which are accepted by virtue of these tests are not actually observed at all.

The intellectual treatment of any datum, any experience, any subject, is determined by the nature of our questions, and only carried out in the answers.

A mind that is very selective to forms... is apt to use its images metaphorically, to exploit their possible significance for the conception of remote or intangible ideas.

Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.

Real thinking is possible only in the light of genuine language, no matter how limited, how primitive.

The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color.

Nature, as man has always known it, he knows no more. Since he has learned to esteem signs above symbols, to suppress his emotional reactions in favor of practical ones and make use of nature instead of holding so much of it sacred, he has altered the face, if not the heart, of reality.