Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Quotes

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

The world, when you look at it, it just can't be random. I mean, it's so different than the vast emptiness that is everything else, and even all the other planets we've seen, at least in our solar system, none of them even remotely resemble the precious life-giving nature of our own planet.

Magic is something that happens that appears to be impossible. What I call 'illusion magic' uses laws of science and nature that are already known. Real magic uses laws that haven't yet been discovered.

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

Love was the secret behind everything...love was what made vineyards grow and filled the spaces between the stars, and fixed the ground beneath his feet. It didn't matter if you acknowledged it or not. You couldn't stop the motion of the earth or hold back the ocean tides, or break the pull of the moon. You couldn't stop the rain or pull a shade over the sun.

What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.

Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

We must keep our freedom of mind, ... and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

Nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience.

It has always seemed to me extreme presumptuousness on the part of those who want to make human ability the measure of what nature can and knows how to do, since, when one comes down to it, there is not one effect in nature, no matter how small, that even the most speculative minds can fully understand.

Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see.

Nature's action is complex: and nothing is gained in the long run by pretending that it is simple, and trying to describe it in a series of elementary propositions.

While I am describing to you how Nature works, you won't understand why Nature works that way. But you see, nobody understands that.

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health!

This is a general law of the universe, overlooked by science, that out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty-conserving, or complexity-conserving engine.

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.

As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

In the end, science as we know it has two basic types of practitioners. One is the educated man who still has a controlled sense of wonder before the universal mystery, whether it hides in a snail's eye or within the light that impinges on that delicate organ. The second kind of observer is the extreme reductionist who is so busy stripping things apart that the tremendous mystery has been reduced to a trifle, to intangibles not worth troubling one's head about.

Nature never wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.

Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.