Mathematical discoveries, like springtime violets in the woods, have their season which no man can hasten or retard.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The Pythagoreans degrade impious men into brutes and, if one is to believe Empedocles, even into plants.
I remember from my school days Archimedes jumping into his bath and displacing water and coming up with his famous principle, and of course Isaac Newton being hit on the head with an apple. In other words, this realm of human knowledge - which is mathematical, essentially - can have a playful visual element to it.
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
At the Summer Solstice, all is green and growing, potential coming into being, the miracle of manifestation painted large on the canvas of awareness. At the Winter Solstice, the wind is cold, trees are bare and all lies in stillness beneath blankets of snow.
Many who have had an opportunity of knowing any more about mathematics confuse it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great amount of imagination.
One of the pleasures of looking at the world through mathematical eyes is that you can see certain patterns that would otherwise be hidden.
We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions.
Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.
Scientists who play by someone else's rules don't have much chance of making discoveries.
It is characteristic of science that the full explanations are often seized in their essence by the percipient scientist long in advance of any possible proof.