Acquisition Quote by William James

“If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all…

— Henry David Thoreau

Each poem in becoming generates the laws by which it is generated: extensions of the laws to other poems never completely take.

— A. R. Ammons

Certain supplementary restrictions imposed on the text compel us to perceive it as poetry. As soon as one assigns a given text to the…

— Yuri Lotman

“Many concepts and ideas become laws in time, like the laws of physics. In time, many of these same concepts lose validity in favor…

— Dejan Stojanovic

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves

— Johann Georg Hamann

In the final, the positive, state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe,…

— Auguste Comte

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

— Gustave Flaubert

“For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn,…

— Louis Poinsot

In mathematical science, more than in all others, it happens that truths which are at one period the most abstract, and apparently the most…

— Charles Babbage

“There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a…

— Jorge Luis Borges

Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there…

— C.D. Wright

The mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge…

— Henri Poincare