#scienc

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. ↗

— George Santayana

#beauty

Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics. ↗

— Aleister Crowley

#arts #branch #comprehension #difficult #errors

In these days when science is clearly in the saddle and when our knowledge of disease is advancing at a breathless pace, we are apt to forget that not all can ride and that he also serves who waits and who applies what the horseman discovers. ↗

— Harvey Cushing

#also #applies #apt #breathless #clearly

There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies. ↗

— Olaf Stapledon

#religion #science #thought #beauty

The three creative prototypes, the scientist, the artist, and the saint, know instinctively, without the help of any mere philosopher, that each must obey an absolute rule of conduct. Three words established and hallowed by usage express the divinities, the values, the supreme aims served respectively by these three kinds of men with an undivided loyalty: truth for the scientist; beauty for the artist; goodness for the saint. The discussion on what these words mean will never end. We must be content with taking note of their clarity as symbols, and of the singular force which animates them and makes of them powerful poles of attraction. ↗

— Salvador de Madariaga

#science #spirit #art

The social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the same mathematical underpinnings that had made the "hard" sciences so brilliantly successful. ↗

— Herbert Simon

#had #hard #i #kind #made

We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions. ↗

— Whitfield Diffie

#mathematics #problems #science #simple #solutions

To attempt this would be like seeing without eyes or directing the gaze of knowledge behind one's own eye. Modern science can acknowledge no other than this epistemological stand-point. ↗

— Wilhelm Dilthey

#attempt #behind #directing #epistemological #eye

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them. ↗

— Martin Henry Fischer

#birds #could #eat #except #half

Unfortunately things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect. ↗

— Freeman Dyson

#become #climate #different #dogmas #heavily