“I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”

Sir Douglas Robb Lectures, University of Auckland (1979); lecture 1, "Photons: Corpuscles of Light" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLQ2atfqk2c&t=24m2s
Context: There's a kind of saying that you don't understand its meaning, 'I don't believe it. It's too crazy. I'm not going to accept it.'… You'll have to accept it. It's the way nature works. If you want to know how nature works, we looked at it, carefully. Looking at it, that's the way it looks. You don't like it? Go somewhere else, to another universe where the rules are simpler, philosophically more pleasing, more psychologically easy. I can't help it, okay? If I'm going to tell you honestly what the world looks like to the human beings who have struggled as hard as they can to understand it, I can only tell you what it looks like.

Source: Mind As Behavior And Studies In Empirical Idealism, (1924), p. 3: Chapter 1.

As quoted in Lightning Fast Enlightenment: A Journey to the Secrets of Happiness (2000) by Jordan S. Metzger, p. 9

Source: Il Penseroso (1631), Line 120

After the Theatre (1892)

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 1, p. 8

As quoted in The God Particle (1993) by Leon Lederman – ISBN 978–0–618–71168–0
Context: The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike. Faraday did this when he closed the link between electricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it when he linked both with light. Einstein linked time with space, mass with energy, and the path of light past the sun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dying years in trying to add to these likenesses another, which would find a single imaginative order between the equations between Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry of gravitation When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought: beauty he said, is "unity in variety." Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature — or more exactly, in the variety of our experience.

Variant: I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.