If Nature Were Not Beautiful,

Consider Now The Milky Way. Here Also We See An Innumerable Dust, Only The Grains Of This Dust Are No Longer Atoms But Stars; These Grains Also Move With Great Velocities, They Act At A Distance One Upon Another, But This Action Is So Slight At Great Distances That Their Trajectories Are Rectilineal; Nevertheless, From Time To Time, Two Of Them May Come Near Enough Together To Be Deviated From Their Course, Like A Comet That Passed Too Close To Jupiter. In A Word, In The Eyes Of A Giant, To Whom Our Suns Were What Our Atoms Are To Us, The Milky Way Would Only Look Like A Bubble Of Gas.

It Is A Misfortune For A Science To Be Born Too Late When The Means Of Observation Have Become Too Perfect. That Is What Is Happening At This Moment With Respect To Physical Chemistry; The Founders Are Hampered In Their General Grasp By Third And Fourth Decimal Places.

Ideas Rose In Clouds; I Felt Them Collide Until Pairs Interlocked, So To Speak, Making A Stable Combination.

But For Harmony Beautiful To Contemplate, Science Would Not Be Worth Following.

...the Feeling Of Mathematical Beauty, Of The Harmony Of Numbers And Of Forms, Of Geometric Elegance. It Is A Genuinely Aesthetic Feeling, Which All Mathematicians Know