Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

Art is just as comprehensible as science, but in its own terms.

The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it-right or wrong-may be given.

Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

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.