“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.” Richard Dawkins

“Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practice it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. If we try to squeeze science into a single philosophical viewpoint such as reductionism, we are like Procrustes chopping off the feet of his guests when they do not fit onto his bed. Science flourishes best when it uses freely all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions of what science ought to be. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.” Freeman Dyson

“The evolution of complex life, its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws is wonderfully surprising, or would be, up for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process. Our existence is desperately surprising. Natural selection produces living organisms which are entities of gigantic but not infinite probability. On one planet, and possibly only one planet in the entire universe, molecules which would normally would made nothing more complicated than a chunk of rock, have some how manage to gather them selves together into chunks of rock size matter, capable in some cases of thinking and feeling and falling in love yet other chunks of complex matter. What we see of the real world, in a sense is not the unvarnished real world, but a model of the real world regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so is useful for dealing with real world. The nature of the model in our head depends of the kind of animal we are.” Richard Dawkins