A people of scholars, if they are physically degenerate, weak-willed and cowardly pacifists, will not storm the heavens, indeed, they will not be able to safeguard their existence on this earth.
Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ... [By seeking] logical beauty spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for the deeper penetration into the laws of nature.
Who then understands the reciprocal flux and reflux of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abysses of being, and the avalanches of creation?
These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights, that give a name to every fixed star, have no more profit of their shining nights than those that walk and know not what they are.
[George] Uhlenbeck was a highly gifted physicist. One of his remarkable traits was he would read every issue of T%he Physical Review from cover to cover.
It is in the name of Moses that Bellarmin thunderstrikes Galileo; and this great vulgarizer of the great seeker Copernicus, Galileo, the old man of truth, the magian of the heavens, was reduced to repeating on his knees word for word after the inquisitor this formula of shame: "Corde sincera et fide non ficta abjuro maledico et detestor supradictos errores et hereses." Falsehood put an ass's hood on science.
This world was once a fluid haze of light, Till toward the centre set the starry tides, And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast The planets: then the monster, then the man.
Science was false by being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile or a mollusk, and isolated it-which is hunting for life in graveyards. Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.
The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all as things now are with slight endeavour and scanty success.