Donald Knuth Quotes

Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

The scientist and engineers who are building the future need the poets to make sense of it.

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

I feel like science and art are cousins.

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

Art is science in the flesh.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

What I can't create I don't understand

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn't exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

We could go work on curing cancer. We could go work on building spaceships. We could go work on art projects. What's fun about working at Asana is we get to work on all of them at the same time.

Collecting facts is important. Knowledge is important. But if you don't have an imagination to use the knowledge, civilization is nowhere.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

I think it's important to understand the concrete ways things work and to respect that. But some things shouldn't be explained, and you have to respect that, too.

I believe that science is the engine of prosperity, that if you look around at the wealth of civilization today, it's the wealth that comes from science.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

He who does not know how to create should not know.