Roald Hoffmann Quotes

For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.

The whole question of imagination in science is often misunderstood by people in other disciplines. ... They overlook the fact that whatever we are allowed to imagine in science must be consistent with everything else we know.

You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.” “A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.” “You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right.

Illusions... are simple facts, but they have been created by the mind, by the spirit, and they are one of the justifications of the new spatial configuration.

What is more simple than to tell to a little boy, 'This is not the truth, it is a game?'

It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecutionof science as imagination. Find me a people whose early medicine is not mixed up with magic and incantations, and I will find you a people devoid of all scientific ability.

Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

If some people can imagine that a person they love is alive in another world, why can't I imagine Maurice is alive in this one An artist is a person who uses art to run away from reality. It's not wrong-it's survival. There's nothing wrong with me creating a world in which Maurice is alive.

Fantasy is seductive and much more wonderful than reality, but you can't take it to the bank. It's always an escape. And if used as an escape, as in attending a movie or a show for a circumscribed period of time, it's fine. When it starts to become undifferentiated from reality, it leads to big trouble.

I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn't that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.

There's not much difference between a fantasist and a visionary. We all have dreams and without dreams in business, I don't believe you can be successful. The trick is to turn them into reality.

A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.

If wishes were stories, beggars would read.

O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales.

Any mental activity is easy if it need not be subjected to reality.

We spend our whole lives worrying about the future, planning for the future, trying to predict the future, as if figuring it out will cushion the blow. But the future is always changing. The future is the home of our deepest fears and wildest hopes. But one thing is certain when it finally reveals itself. The future is never the way we imagined it.

Reality, whether approached imaginatively or empirically, remains a surface, hermetic.

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different

Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.

History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

Dreams, dreams. I walk them; I live them. I delude myself with them. It's a wonder I can spot reality anymore.

The Difference Engine can in reality (as has been already partly explained) do nothing but add; and any other processes, not excepting those of simple subtraction, multiplication and division, can be performed by it only just to that extent in which it is possible, by judicious mathematical arrangement and artifices, to reduce them to a series of additions.

The joy in what I do is mostly creativity. I think creativity is an ecstatic impulse that we all have. And there's nothing more joyful than having a moment of creative insight and actually creating, or rather manifesting or incarnating your creative insight into actual, physical reality.

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

While growing up, I lived in my own fantasy world. I had kind of a rough childhood, so I created my own reality.