Science and Culture Quotes

“For most foreigners the uncontrolled freedom of German students is a subject of astonishment; the more so as it is usually some obvious excrescences of this freedom which first meet their eyes; they are unable to understand how young men can be left to themselves without the greatest detriment. The German looks back to his student life as to his golden age; our literature and our poetry are full of expressions of this feeling. Nothing of this kind is but even faintly suggested in the literature of other European peoples. The German student alone has this perfect joy in the time, in which, in the first delight in youthful responsibility, and freed more immediately from having to work for extraneous interests, he can devote himself to the task of striving after the best and noblest which the human race has hitherto been able to attain in knowledge and in speculation”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“Every adherent of any given cosmological system, in which, for well or ill, facts must be made to correspond with reality, felt himself [in the 'former time'] to be a philosopher. The philosophers of that time knew little more of the laws of nature than the unlearned layman; but the stress of their endeavours was laid upon thinking, upon the logical consequences and completeness of the system. It is not difficult to understand how in periods of youthful development, such a one-sided over-estimate of thought could be arrived at.”
― Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays

“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