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The pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.”

Max Planck

It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.
MAX PLANCK

Art Equality Impossible Religion Science Simplicity
Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: ‘Ye must have faith.’
MAX PLANCK

Engagement Kind Science Serious Temple Word Work Writing
An indispensable hypothesis, even though still far from being a guarantee of success, is however the pursuit of a specific aim, whose lighted beacon, even by initial failures, is not betrayed.
MAX PLANCK

Betrayal Failure Goal Light Pursuit Success
Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.
MAX PLANCK

Constitution Goal Human Intelligence Light Possible Quick
This is one of man’s oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature’s laws?
MAX PLANCK

Harmony Human Independence Law Man Nature Old Order Subject
All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force.
MAX PLANCK

Existence Force Origin Science Virtue
It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.
MAX PLANCK

Accident Age Deep Greatness Religious Soul Thinking
We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.
MAX PLANCK

Health Life Maintain Relative Rest Science Struggle
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.
MAX PLANCK

Mystery Nature Ourselves Science Try
Those scientists who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.
MAX PLANCK

Entertainment Ideas Rich Science Thinking
Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.
MAX PLANCK

Death Hands Science Stop Terrible Work
Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
MAX PLANCK

Experiment Imagination Knowledge Poetry
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness.
MAX PLANCK

Conscious Fundamental Myself Regard
The entire world we apprehend through our senses is no more than a tiny fragment in the vastness of Nature.
MAX PLANCK

Fragment Nature Vast World
There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.
MAX PLANCK

Oneself Reality Religion Science
We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.
MAX PLANCK

Beyond Position Space

The pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.”

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The pioneer scientist must have “a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination.”

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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