
As quoted in Problems of Life (1952), by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as reported in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan L. Mackay, p. 219
As quoted in Problems of Life (1952), by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, as reported in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) edited by Alan L. Mackay, p. 219
“Research is to see what everybody has seen and think what nobody has thought.”
Albert Szent-Györgyi (1957), Academic Press. Bioenergetics https://archive.org/details/bioenergetics00szen Part II: Biological structures and functions, p. 57
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.”
"Sensitive Artist"
Lyrics, Fluting on the Hump (1987)
Smuts on the rebuilding of South Africa after the Boer War, in The Theory of Holism, 1940, p. 133
Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger (May 21, 2009)
Context: Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity.Whereas in science, you can't just make stuff up and presume that it is a proper account of nature. At the end of the day, you have to answer to nature. Since everyone has nature to answer to, your creativity is simply discovering something about the natural world that somebody else would have eventually discovered exactly the same way. They might have come through a different path, but they would have landed in the same place.Even though we name theorems and equations after the people who discover them — Newton's laws of gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion — somebody else would have discovered them afterward. It's that simple. Your creativity is not a boundless creativity.
On 30th anniversary of the founding of Israel, in International Herald Tribune (11 May 1978)