d'Alembert, who wrote the introduction to the Encyclopédie, resigned his editorship with the scathing remark that the work was like a harlequin's coa… - Tobias Dantzig

Poincaré was an artist par excellence. Estheticism with him was not a mere creed: it was a way of life.

The Industrial Revolution, too, failed to introduce a reign of freedom and happiness: it converted the medieval serf into an industrial slave; replaced the feudal baron by the industrial mogul, created in its wake an ever-growing, ever-shifting class of declassés, who had neither pride of ancestry nor love of tradition... The age of machine and competition, of capital, class-struggle, and demagogy was upon man.

The evolution of scientific thought is inseparable from the history of man's efforts to resolve the perplexities of his own existence.