“Try to know everything about something and something about everything.”

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: I am a reasonably emotional person, and I see no reason why that's incompatible with being a scientist. Even if we learn about how everything works, that doesn't mean anything at all. You can reduce how an impala leaps to a bunch of biomechanical equations. You can turn Bach into contrapuntal equations, and that doesn't reduce in the slightest our capacity to be moved by a gazelle leaping or Bach thundering. There is no reason to be less moved by nature around us simply because it's revealed to have more layers of complexity than we first observed.
The more important reason why people shouldn't be afraid is, we're never going to inadvertently go and explain everything. We may learn everything about something, and we may learn something about everything, but we're never going to learn everything about everything. When you study science, and especially these realms of the biology of what makes us human, what's clear is that every time you find out something, that brings up ten new questions, and half of those are better questions than you started with.

" An aphorism for atheism http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/09/03/an-aphorism-for-atheism/" September 3, 2013

Source: Pollyanna

Source: Pollyanna

As quoted in "Community Mourns the Death of Martin de Maat" by Lisa Lewis (2 March 2001) http://www.performink.com/Archives/obituaries/DemaatMartin3201.html