Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as a measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.... This cannot be an easy life.
ATTRIBUTION:
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), U.S. physicist. Quoted in Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, trans. by James Cleugh (1970).
