Science and Culture Quotes

“Every great deed of which history tells us, every mighty passion which art can represent, every picture of manners, of civic arrangements, of the culture of peoples of distant lands, or of remote times, seizes and interests us, even if there is no exact scientific connection among them. We continually find points of contact and comparison in our own conceptions and feelings; we get to know the hidden capacities and desires of the mind.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“In his [Goethe's] studies on morphology, he reminds one of a spectator at a play, with strong artistic sympathies. His delicate instinct makes him feel how all the details fall into their places, and work harmoniously together, and how some common purpose governs the whole; and yet, while this exquisite order and symmetry gives him intense pleasure, he cannot formulate the dominant idea. That is reserved for the scientific critic of the drama, while the artistic spectator feels perhaps, as Goethe did in the presence of natural phenomena, an antipathy to such dissection, fearing... that his pleasure may be spoilt by it.
[On Goethe's Scientific Researches (1853)]”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“Goethe, though he exercised his powers in many spheres, is nevertheless, par excellence, a poet. Now in poetry, as in every other art, the essential thing is to make the material of the art, be it words, or music, or colour, the direct vehicle of an idea. In the perfect work of art, the idea must be present and dominate the whole, almost unknown to the poet himself, not as the result of a long intellectual process, but as inspired by a direct intuition of the inner eye, or by an outburst of excited feeling.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays