“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.”
— T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, 1942.
“There is no logical way to the discovery of these elementary laws. There is only the way of intuition . . . The longing to behold [cosmic] harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance . . . The state of mind that enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”
— Albert Einstein, quoted in Lifting the Veil, the Feminine Face of Science, Linda Jean Shepherd, 1993, p. 215.
“I remember perfectly well the intense satisfaction and delight with which I had listened, by the hour, to Bach’s fugues . . . and it has often occurred to me that the pleasure derived from musical compositions of this kind . . . is exactly the same as in most of my [scientific research on] problems of morphology — that you have the theme in one of the old masters’ works followed out in all its endless variations, always reappearing and always reminding you of the unity in variety.”
— Thomas Huxley, 1895, quoted in Developmental Biology, second edition, Scott F. Gilbert, 1988, p. 3.
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