M. C. Escher Quotes

There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account. Long before there were people on the earth, crystals were already growing in the earth's crust. On one day or another, a human being first came across such a sparkling morsel of regularity lying on the ground or hit one with his stone tool and it broke off and fell at his feet, and he picked it up and regarded it in his open hand, and he was amazed.

In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is nonetheless a living being

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

I was captured for life by chemistry and by crystals.

Crystals grew inside rock like arithmetic flowers. They lengthened and spread, added plane to plane in an awed and perfect obedience to an absolute geometry that even stones - maybe only the stones - understood.

Man, a mere inhabitant of the earth, cannot overstep its boundaries! But though he is confined to its crust, he may penetrate into all its secrets.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.

I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, 'Concerning the Nature of Things.'

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!

Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.

There really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

While the vaccine discovery was progressive, the joy I felt at the prospect before me of being the instrument destined to take away from the world one of its greatest calamities [smallpox], blended with the fond hope of enjoying independence and domestic peace and happiness, was often so excessive that, in pursuing my favourite subject among the meadows, I have sometimes found myself in a kind of reverie.

A great discovery is a fact whose appearance in science gives rise to shining ideas, whose light dispels many obscurities and shows us new paths.

Scientific truth is universal, because it is only discovered by the human brain and not made by it, as art is.

If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.

But nature did not deem it her business to make the discovery of her laws easy for us.

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

Existence has no personality. No question of personalities, it simply is whatsoever it is. To experience existence as it is, is to know the truth.

In the long run, there are no secrets. in science. The universe will not cooperate in a cover-up.

Truth is truth no matter what I think.

Every new discovery of science is a further 'revelation' of the order which God has built into His universe.

We may say that life has borrowed from inanimate processes the same basic mechanism used in producing those striking structures that are crystals, with their beautiful plane faces.

We are very lucky to be living in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America-you only discover it once. The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature, and that day will never come again. It is very exciting, it is marvelous, but this excitement will have to go.