The theist and the scientist are rival interpreters of nature, the one retreats as the other advances.
--
The Existence of God (1913), p. 84Joseph McCabe
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It may be said that the swordsmen neither vies in a contest, nor concerns himself with strength or weakness, nor advances or retreats a single step. His opponent does not see him; he does not see his opponent. If he concentrates on the area where heaven and earth remain unseparated and yin and yang do not show, he should achieve success straightforwardly.
Yagyu Munenori
To be creative, scientists need libraries and laboratories and the company of other scientists; certainly a quiet and untroubled life is a help. A scientist's work is in no way deepened or made more cogent by privation, anxiety, distress, or emotional harassment. To be sure, the private lives of scientists may be strangely and even comically mixed up, but not in ways that have any special bearing on the nature and quality of their work. If a scientist were to cut off an ear, no one would interpret such an action as evidence of an unhappy torment of creativity; nor will a scientist be excused any bizarrerie, however extravagant, on the grounds that he is a scientist, however brilliant.
Peter Medawar
The false interpreters of nature declare that quicksilver is the common seed of every metal, not remembering that nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world.
Leonardo da Vinci
Those men who are inventors and interpreters between Nature and Man, as compared with boasters and declaimers of the works of others, must be regarded and not otherwise esteemed than as the object in front of a mirror, when compared with its image seen in the mirror. For the first is something in itself, and the other nothingness. — Folks little indebted to Nature, since it is only by chance that they wear the human form and without it I might class them with the herds of beasts.
Leonardo da Vinci
Who would be such a fool as to make advances to his reader, advances which might end in rejection or, worse still, in acceptance?
Randall Jarrell
McCabe, Joseph
McCain, John
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