19 quotes
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
Science and Human Values (1956)
In science and in art and in self-knowledge we explore and move constantly by turning to the world of sense to ask, Is this so?
Science and Human Values (1956)
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Tolerance among scientists cannot be based on indifference, it must be based on respect.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Those who think that science is ethically neutral confuse the findings of science, which are, with the activity of science, which is not.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.
Science and Human Values (1956)
No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts.
Science and Human Values (1956)
It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Dissent is the mark of freedom.
Science and Human Values (1956)
The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.
Science and Human Values (1956)
The painter's portrait and the physicist's explanation are both rooted in reality, but they have been changed by the painter or the physicist into something more subtly imagined than the photographic appearance of things.
Science and Human Values (1956)
We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them.
Science and Human Values (1956)
There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that
We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.
Science and Human Values (1956)
In “The Creative Mind” I set out to show that there exists a single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.
Science and Human Values (2011)
Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.
Science and Human Values (1956)
Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her — than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.
Science and Human Values (1956)