Understanding Nature Quotes

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing. We have not fully recognized this process of leaping ahead, however, in part because textbooks tend to tame revolutions...They describe the advances as if they had been logical in their day, not all shocking.

Real progress in understanding nature is rarely incremental. All important advances are sudden intuitions, new principles, new ways of seeing.

Man masters nature not by force, but by understanding

I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.

Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

Modern man, seeking a middle position in the evaluation of sense impression and thought, can, following Plato , interpret the process of understanding nature as a correspondence, that is, a coming into congruence of pre-existing images of the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. Modern man, of course, unlike Plato , looks on the pre-existent original images also as not invariable, but as relative to the development of a conscious point of view, so that the word "dialectic" which Plato is fond of using may be applied to the process of development of human knowledge.

An understanding of the natural world and what's in it is a source of not only a great curiosity but great fulfillment...

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.

I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.