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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index A > Category: Art

Art Quotes (63 quotes)

"…comparing the capacity of computers to the capacity of the human brain, I’ve often wondered, where does our success come from? The answer is synthesis, the ability to combine creativity and calculation, art and science, into whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
— Garry Kasparov
In How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom (2007), 4.
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Error has made man so deep, sensitive, and inventive that he has put forth such blossoms as religions and arts. Pure knowledge could not have been capable of it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Human, All-To-Human, Vol. 1, 44-45. (1878), 140. In Willard Huntington Wright, What Nietzsche Taught? (1917), 78.
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L'Art est fait pour troubler, la Science rassure.
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures.
— Georges Braque
Georges Braque Illustrated Notebooks:1917-1955, trans. S. Appelbaum (1971), 10.
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La civilisation, c'est l'art de se créer des besoins inutiles.
Civilization is the art of creating useless needs.
— Léo Errera
In Recueil d'Œuvres de Léo Errera: Botanique Générale (1908), 198. Google translation by Webmaster.
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Notatio naturae, et animadversio perperit artem
Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
In Jon R. Stone, The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations (2005), 78.
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A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,—'Art is myself; science is ourselves. '
Victor Hugo in William Shakespeare, 1864.
— Claude Bernard
An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. Henry Copley Green (1957), 43.
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Alchemy is the art that separates what is useful from what is not by transforming it into its ultimate matter and essence.
— Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus
In Walter Pagel, Paracelsus, 2nd edition (1982), 113.
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All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear, 'Whatever IS, is RIGHT.'
— Alexander Pope
'An Essay on Man' (1733-4), Epistle I. In John Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope (1965), 515.
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All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
— Sir Thomas Browne
In Religio Medici (1642, 1754), pt. 1, sec. 16, 42.
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An inventor is one who can see the applicability of means to supply demand five years before it is obvious to those skilled in the art.
— Reginald Fessenden
Aphorism listed Frederick Seitz, The Cosmic Inventor: Reginald Aubrey Fessenden (1866-1932) (1999), 54, being Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Held at Philadelphia For Promoting Useful Knowledge, Vol. 86, Pt. 6.
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Any clod can have the facts; having opinions is an art.
— Charles McCabe
McCabe's motto (?) as columnist for San Francisco Chronicle. Margin quote, in Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Computer Group, Computer (1984), 89.
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Architecture is of all the arts the one nearest to a science, for every architectural design is at its inception dominated by scientific considerations. The inexorable laws of gravitation and of statics must be obeyed by even the most imaginative artist in building.
— Anonymous
In 'The Message of Greek Architecture', The Chautauquan (Apr 1906), 43, 110.
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Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that’s their order of importance.
— Muriel Spark
Dialog by the character Miss Brodie, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961, 2004), 23-24.
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Art is nothing but humanized science.
— Gino Severini
In Marco Treves, Artists on art, from the XIV to the XX century (1945), 437.
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Art is science made flesh.
— Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau
Le Coq et I'Arlequin, Preface. In Margaret Crosland, Jean Cocteau: a Biography (1956), 121.
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Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death.
— William Blake
Annotations to the print (c. 1826-27), Laocoön: Jehovah & His Two Sons, Satan & Adam. An engraving of Laocoön, the well-known classical sculpture, is surrounded with many short, graffiti-like comments. These two sayings are in the blank space to the right of the picture. This was Blake's last illuminated work. Transcribed in William Blake and Edwin John Ellis (ed.), The Poetical Works of William Blake (1906), Vol. 1, 435.
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Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
— John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)
The Pleasures of Life (1887, 2007), 99.

As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.
— Isidor Isaac Rabi
In Kermit Lansner, Second-Rate Brains: A Factual, Perceptive Report by Top Scientists, Educators, Journalists, and Their Urgent Recommendations (1958), 31. Note: Dr. I.I. Rabi was chairman of President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Committee.
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Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.
— James Joseph Sylvester
Attributed.
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Considerable obstacles generally present themselves to the beginner, in studying the elements of Solid Geometry, from the practice which has hitherto uniformly prevailed in this country, of never submitting to the eye of the student, the figures on whose properties he is reasoning, but of drawing perspective representations of them upon a plane. ...I hope that I shall never be obliged to have recourse to a perspective drawing of any figure whose parts are not in the same plane.
— Augustus De Morgan
Quoted in Adrian Rice, 'What Makes a Great Mathematics Teacher?' The American Mathematical Monthly, (June-July 1999), 540.
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Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.
— Robert Burton
Anatomy of Melancholy (16th Ed., 1838), 148.
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Essentially only one thing in life interests us: our psychical constitution, the mechanism of which was and is wrapped in darkness. All human resources, art, religion, literature, philosophy and historical sciences, all of them join in bringing lights in this darkness. But man has still another powerful resource: natural science with its strictly objective methods. This science, as we all know, is making huge progress every day. The facts and considerations which I have placed before you at the end of my lecture are one out of numerous attempts to employ a consistent, purely scientific method of thinking in the study of the mechanism of the highest manifestations of life in the dog, the representative of the animal kingdom that is man's best friend.
— Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
'Physiology of Digestion', Nobel Lecture (12 Dec 1904). In Nobel Lectures: Physiology or Medicine 1901-1921 (1967), 134
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Every great anthropologic and paleontologic discovery fits into its proper place, enabling us gradually to fill out, one after another, the great branching lines of human ascent and to connect with the branches definite phases of industry and art. This gives us a double means of interpretation, archaeological and anatomical. While many branches and links in the chain remain to be discovered, we are now in a position to predict with great confidence not only what the various branches will be like but where they are most like to be found.
— Henry Fairfield Osborn
In Henry Fairfield Osborn, 'Osborn States the Case For Evolution', New York Times (12 Jul 1925), XX1
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Every work of science great enough to be well remembered for a few generations affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic.
— Charles Sanders Peirce
'The Fixation of Belief (1877). In Justus Buchler, The Philosophy of Pierce (1940), 6.
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Every writer must reconcile, as best he may, the conflicting claims of consistency and variety, of rigour in detail and elegance in the whole. The present author humbly confesses that, to him, geometry is nothing at all, if not a branch of art.
— Julian Lowell Coolidge
Concluding remark in preface to Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves (1931), x.
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First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
— Alexander Pope
#039;Essay On Criticism#039;, Miscellaneous Poems and Translations: by Several Hands (1720), 38.
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Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are put of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.
— Sir Joshua Reynolds
Discourse VI, delivered at the Royal Academy, Discourses on Painting and the Fine Arts(1850 ), 32.
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How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.
— Isaac Asimov
'Prometheus.' The Roving Mind (1983), Chap 25.
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I think a strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art. This is best seen in the theoretical aspects of Physical Science. The mathematical theorist builds up on certain assumptions and according to well understood logical rules, step by step, a stately edifice, while his imaginative power brings out clearly the hidden relations between its parts. A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production. A fine example is the famous Kinetic Theory of Maxwell. ... The theory of relativity by Einstein, quite apart from any question of its validity, cannot but be regarded as a magnificent work of art.
Responding to the toast, 'Science!' at the Royal Academy of the Arts in 1932.)
— Sir Ernest Rutherford
Quoted in Lawrence Badash, 'Ernest Rutherford and Theoretical Physics,' in Robert Kargon and Peter Achinstein (eds.) Kelvin's Baltimore Lectures and Modern Theoretical Physics: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (1987), 352.
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If mankind is to profit freely from the small and sporadic crop of the heroically gifted it produces, it will have to cultivate the delicate art of handling ideas. Psychology is now able to tell us with reasonable assurance that the most influential obstacle to freedom of thought and to new ideas is fear; and fear which can with inimitable art disguise itself as caution, or sanity, or reasoned skepticism, or on occasion even as courage.
— Wilfred Trotter
'The Commemoration of Great Men', Hunterian Oration, Royal College of Surgeons (15 Feb 1952) British Medical Journal (20 Feb 1932), 1, 317-20. The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter, FRS (1941), 30.
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If someone separated the art of counting and measuring and weighing from all the other arts, what was left of each (of the others) would be, so to speak, insignificant.
— Plato
Philebus 55e. Trans. R. W. Sharples.
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In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism—beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.
— Edward O. Wilson
'The Biological Diversity Crisis: A Challenge to Science', Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 1985), 2:1, 22. Reprinted in Nature Revealed: Selected Writings, 1949-2006 (2006), 622.
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In science the successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can apply it. ... In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.
— Bertrand Russell
Essay, 'The Place Of Science In A Liberal Education.' In Mysticism and Logic: and Other Essays (1919), 41.
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Industry is best at the intersection of science and art.
— Edwin Herbert Land
In Alan R. Earls and Nasrin Rohani, Polaroid (2005), 20.
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It is sometimes asserted that a surgical operation is or should be a work of art ... fit to rank with those of the painter or sculptor. ... That proposition does not admit of discussion. It is a product of the intellectual innocence which I think we surgeons may fairly claim to possess, and which is happily not inconsistent with a quite adequate worldly wisdom.
— Wilfred Trotter
Address, opening of 1932-3 session of U.C.H. Medical School (4 Oct 1932), 'Art and Science in medicine', The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter, FRS (1941), 93.
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Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.
— Benjamin Jowett
Quoted in Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Master of Balliol College, Oxford (1897), Vol. 1, 131.
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Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
— Antoine-Thomson d' Abbadie
In Aspects of Science: Second Series (1926), 94.
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Medicine has been defined to be the art or science of amusing a sick man with frivolous speculations about his disorder, and of tampering ingeniously, till nature either kills or cures him.
— Anonymous
In Tryon Edwards (ed.), A Dictionary of Thoughts (1908), 339.
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Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
— Sir William Osler
William Bennett Bean (ed.), Sir William Osler: Aphorisms from his Bedside Teachings and Writings, No. 265 (1950), 125.
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Medicine rests upon four pillars—philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and ethics. The first pillar is the philosophical knowledge of earth and water; the second, astronomy, supplies its full understanding of that which is of fiery and airy nature; the third is an adequate explanation of the properties of all the four elements—that is to say, of the whole cosmos—and an introduction into the art of their transformations; and finally, the fourth shows the physician those virtues which must stay with him up until his death, and it should support and complete the three other pillars.
— Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus
Vas Buch Paragranum (c.1529-30), in J. Jacobi (ed.), Paracelsus: Selected Writings (1951), 133-4.
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Mighty is geometry; joined with art, resistless.
— Euripides
As quoted in several mathematics books, but without further citation, for example, in Morris Kline, Mathematics for the Nonmathematician (1967), 209. If you know the primary source, plase contact webmaster.
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Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.
— Camille Paglia
'Alice in Muscle Land,' Boston Globe (27 Jan 1991). Reprinted in Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), 82.
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No man can thoroughly master more than one art or science.
— William Hazlitt
The Round Table: a Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners (1817), Vol. 2, 40.
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Nothing is lost and nothing is created in the operations of art as those of nature.
— Louis Pasteur
Pasteur Vallery-Radot (ed.), Correspondance de Pasteur 1840-1895 (1940), Vol. 1, 326. Quoted in Patrice Debré, Louis Pasteur, trans. Elborg Forster (1994), 90.
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Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development in Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through a process of continuous differentiation, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous is that in which Progress essentially consists.
— Herbert Spencer
'Progress: Its Law and Cause', Westminster Review (1857), 67, 446-7.
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One of the main causes of our artistic decline lies beyond doubt in the separation of art and science.
— Gino Severini
In Marco Treves, Artists on art, from the XIV to the XX century (1945), 437.
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Paradoxical as it may at first appear, the fact is that, as W. H. George has said, scientific research is an art, not a science.
— W. I. B. Beveridge
The Art of Scientific Investigation (1950, 1957), 138.
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Perhaps the best reason for regarding mathematics as an art is not so much that it affords an outlet for creative activity as that it provides spiritual values. It puts man in touch with the highest aspirations and lofiest goals. It offers intellectual delight and the exultation of resolving the mysteries of the universe.
— Morris Kline
Mathematics: a Cultural Approach (1962), 671. Quoted in H. E. Hunter, The Divine Proportion (1970), 6.
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Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
— Freeman Dyson
Infinite in All Directions: Gifford lectures given at Aberdeen, Scotland (2004), 270.
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That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!
— Galileo Galilei
Letter to Ludovico Cigoli. Quoted in Robert Enggass, Jonathan Brown, Italian and Spanish Art, 1600-1750 (1992), 22.
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That which lies before the human race is a constant struggle to maintain and improve, in opposition to State of Nature, the State of Art of an organized polity; in which, and by which, man may develop a worthy civilization
— Thomas Henry Huxley
'Prolegomena', Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays (1897), 45.
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The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.
— Carolus Linnaeus
Philosophia Botanica (1751), aphorism 162. Trans. Frans A. Statfleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of their Ideas in Systematic Botany, 1735-1789 (1971), 67.
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The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
— William James
In The Principles of Psychology (1918), Vol. 2, 369.
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The essence of knowledge is generalization. That fire can be produced by rubbing wood in a certain way is a knowledge derived by generalization from individual experiences; the statement means that rubbing wood in this way will always produce fire. The art of discovery is therefore the art of correct generalization. ... The separation of relevant from irrelevant factors is the beginning of knowledge.
— Hans Reichenbach
The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), 5.
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The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.
— Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
Notes made after the completion of the third chapter of Vol. 3 of La Rivolution, 22 April 1883. In E. Sparvel-Bayly (trans.), Life and Letters of H. Taine (1902-1908), Vol. 3, 239.
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There is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal that is not subject to ordinary theories of art ... The tower will be the tallest edifice ever raised by man. Will it therefore be imposing in its own way?
— Gustave Eiffel
Quoted in J. Harriss, The Tallest Tower: Eiffel and the Belle Epoque (1975), 25. Cited by David P. Billington, 'Bridges and the New Art of Structural Engineering,' in National Research Council (U.S.). Transportation Research Board Subcommittee on Bridge Aesthetics, Bridge Aesthetics Around the World (1991), 67.
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There is one great difficulty with a good hypothesis. When it is completed and rounded, the corners smooth and the content cohesive and coherent, it is likely to become a thing in itself, a work of art. It is then like a finished sonnet or a painting completed. One hates to disturb it. Even if subsequent information should shoot a hole in it, one hates to tear it down because it once was beautiful and whole. One of our leading scientists, having reasoned a reef in the Pacific, was unable for a long time to reconcile the lack of a reef, indicated by soundings, with the reef his mind told him was there.
— John Steinbeck
In John Steinbeck and Edward Flanders Ricketts Sea of Cortez: a Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941), 179-80.
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This single Stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected Corner, I once knew in a flourishing State in a Forest: It was full of Sap, full of Leaves, and full of Boughs: But now, in vain does the busy Art of Man pretend to vie with Nature, by tying that withered Bundle of Twigs to its sapless Trunk: It is at best but the Reverse of what it was; a Tree turned upside down, the Branches on the Earth, and the Root in the Air.
— Jonathan Swift
'A Meditation Upon a Broom-stick: According to The Style and Manner of the Honorable Robert Boyle's Meditations' (1703), collected in 'Thoughts On Various Subjects', The Works of Jonathan Swift (1746), Vol. 1, 55-56.
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To be worth of the name, an experimenter must be at once theorist and practitioner. While he must completely master the art of establishing experimental facts, which are the materials of science, he must also clearly understand the scientific principles which guide his reasoning through the varied experimental study of natural phenomena. We cannot separate these two things: head and hand. An able hand, without a head to direct it, is a blind tool; the head is powerless without its executive hand.
— Claude Bernard
In Claude Bernard and Henry Copley Greene (trans.), An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1927, 1957), 3.
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When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.
— Simone Weil
'Human Personality', Simone Weil: An Anthology editted by Siân Miles,(2000), 55.
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Whether statistics be an art or a science... or a scientific art, we concern ourselves little. It is the basis of social and political dynamics, and affords the only secure ground on which the truth or falsehood of the theories and hypotheses of that complicated science can be brought to the test.
— Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quetelet
Letters on the Theory of Probabilities (1846), trans. O. G. Downes (1849).
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[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.
— Baron Georges Cuvier
Introduction by Jas. Grant Wilson's to John James Audubon and Lucy Audubon (editor), The Life of John James Audubon: the Naturalist (1869), iv.
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[The] subjective [historical] element in geologic studies accounts for two characteristic types that can be distinguished among geologists: one considering geology as a creative art, the other regarding geology as an exact science.
— Reinout Willem van Bemmelen
In 'The Scientific Character of Geology', The Journal of Geology (Jul 1961), 69, No. 4, 453.
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Carl Sagan Thumbnail At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. -- Carl Sagan

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