“Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.”

— Simone de Beauvoir , book The Ethics of Ambiguity

Pt. III : The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity, Ch. 3 : Freedom and Liberation
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)

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Simone de Beauvoir 152

French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, po… 1908–1986

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“The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself.”

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Source: The Creative Process, 1958, p. 97 Partly cited in: Daniel C. Schlenof. " 50 Years Ago: Greatest Scientific Discovery is Science Itself http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/50-100-150-scientific-creativity/," in Scientific American, Aug. 18, 2008.
Context: The most remarkable discovery made by scientists is science itself. The discovery must be compared in importance with the invention of cave-painting and of writing. Like these earlier human creations, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside. And like them, science has surely made a critical step in human development which cannot be reversed. We cannot conceive a future society without science. I have used three words to describe these far - reaching changes : discovery, invention and creation. There are contexts in which one of these words is more appropriate than the others.

“What good is it to accomplish projects, when the project itself is enjoyment enough?”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

Et à quoi bon exécuter des projets, puisque le projet est en lui-même une jouissance suffisante?
XXIV: "Les Projets" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose_-_XXIV._Les_Projets
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“Pure mathematics proves itself a royal science both through its content and form, which contains within itself the cause of its being and its methods of proof. For in complete independence mathematics creates for itself the object of which it treats, its magnitudes and laws, its formulas and symbols.”

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“Reality is being itself. — It is being itself, in becoming itself. Reality in its isness, the "isness" of a thing. Thus isness is the meaning — having freedom in its primary sense — not limited by attachments, confinements, partialization, complexities.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

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“Truth existed before the world began and will still be persisting until long after the world ends, so therefore "source of truth" really has no bearing on anything. What is important is the discovery of truth and its application. That is, to what purpose is the truth put, to what goals it is used for, the method in which the truth is applied, to what benefit the truth is used, that is, who benefits by its use or its non-use or its being hidden or exposed. Such things as truth, facts, knowledge and discoveries, and techniques, are tools, and they in themselves don't have the ability to create or cause any action, effect or result. It is what people do with them that is important. It's the Being behind the tool. A scalpel can cut your throat or it can repair a body. A hammer can bash somebody's brains out or build a house. Therefore, what's more important is the individual's intention and action with that tool, not the tool itself.”

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“The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

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.

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Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, p. 125

“Recently there's been a resurgence of rejection of evolution - possibly one of the most concrete and indisputable discoveries of science. To the extent that we deny this, we're wandering in the darkness.”

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Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Falsch am Positivismus ist, daß er die nun einmal gegebene Arbeitsteilung, die der Wissenschaften von der gesellschaftlichen Praxis und die innerhalb der Wissenschaft, als Maß des Wahren supponiert und keine Theorie erlaubt, welche die Arbeitsteilung selbst als abgeleitet, vermittelt durchsichtig machen, ihrer falschen Autorität entkleiden könnte.
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“For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

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