Nature
“My aim is to borrow from the (visible) world nothing but forces—not forms, but the means of making forms. Not history. Not décor. But the feeling of matter itself, rock, air, water, vegetable matter—and their elementary properties. And acts and phases—not persons and their memory.” (Paul Valéry)
“The idea of landscape, that free falling splendor of sensation that artists unearth in the cosmos or in the ripples of a river lies at the core of human experience, the fabric of experience. Artists experience their environments differently. Intensities and perceptions vary. Regardless, it is the outside space of the imagination that entices and for some artists the richest soil to germinate is there.” (Tad Mike 2009)
Nature never acts, yet it activates everything. (Tao Te Ching)
Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. Richard Feynman
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there. Richard Feynman: The Character of Physical Law (1965)
Seeing our understanding of nature as a mathematical construction has fundamentally different implications from seeing it as an empirical synthesis. in: A Different Universe. Robert B. Laughlin
How can space be curved? And if it is true, how can we know about it? ~Anonymous
You can never smash a rock with an egg ~ Anonymous