Mansion Quotes (4 quotes)
Facts are a heap of bricks and timber. It is only a successful theory that can convert the heap into a stately mansion
Epigraph in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 324.
Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it’s completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it’s all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they’re momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—and couldn’t exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them.
Quoted in interview for website for PBS TV Nova program, 'The Proof'.
The cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live.
In The Story of Utopias (1922), 11.
There is no more reason to believe that man descended from some inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
