Max Bill Quotes

Creativity is essential to particle physics, cosmology, and to mathematics, and to other fields of science, just as it is to its more widely acknowledged beneficiaries - the arts and humanities.

I ran into Isosceles. He had a great idea for a new triangle!

I didn't discover curves; I only uncovered them.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

That was the wonderful thing about Ramanujan. He discovered so much, and yet he left so much more in his garden for other people to discover.

In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.

Science isn't about WHY, it's about WHY NOT!

A man becomes creative, whether he is an artist or scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before.

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.

To learn is to incur surprise-I mean really learning, not just refreshing our memory or adding a new fact. And to invent is to bestow surprise-I mean really inventing, not just innovating what others have done.

To me the greatest moment in an experiment is always just before I learn whether the particular idea is a good or a bad one. Thus even a failure is exciting, and most of my ideas have of course been wrong.

The worth of a new idea is invariably determined, not by the degree of its intuitiveness-which incidentally, is to a major extent a matter of experience and habit-but by the scope and accuracy of the individual laws to the discovery of which it eventually leads.

The greatest discoveries all start with the question "Why?"

Photographic fantasy: more agile and faster in discoveries than murky subconscious processes!

The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination.

Humans test their brand new wings and invent new possibilities using new-fangled things not with grim determination, but with play.

We realized we don't have an invention, that's why we gave it away.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

Write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever.

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.

We crave explanations for most everything, but innovation and progress happen when we allow ourselves to embrace uncertainty.

There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.

Don't 'discover' a subject of any kind.

Discovery is the privilege of the child: the child who has no fear of being once again wrong, of looking like an idiot, of not being serious, of not doing things like everyone else.