If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
Truth is simple, requiring neither study nor art.
Its a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know dont care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science-that it has made it possible for people not to be religious.
It stands to the everlasting credit of science that by acting on the human mind it has overcome man's insecurity before himself and before nature.
The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.
There's something really beautiful about science, that human beings can ask these questions and can answer them. You can make models of nature and understand how it works.
The Knowledge of Nature tends to enlarge the human Mind, and give us more noble, more grand, and exalted Ideas of the Author of Nature, and if well pursu'd, seldom fails producing something useful to Man.
I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits - they may still be very distant - God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.
Intuition is the clear conception of the whole at once.
People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything.
Those honor nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything...
To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's only because we haven't been able to understand it yet.
We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind put into nature.
