I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all t… - Albert Einstein

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Concepts that have proven useful in ordering things easily achieve such authority over us that we forget their earthly origins and accept them as unalterable givens. Thus they come to be stamped as “necessities of thought”, “a priori givens”, etc. The path of scientific advance is often made impassable for a long time through such errors. For that reason, it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. By this means, their all-too-great authority will be broken. They will be removed if they cannot be properly legitimated, corrected if their correlation with given things be far too superfluous, replaced by others if a new system can be established that we prefer for whatever reason.

Human nature always has tried to form for itself a simple and synoptic image of the surrounding world. In doing this it tries to construct a picture which will give some sort of tangible expression to what the human mind sees in nature. That is what the poet does, and the painter, and the speculative philosopher and the natural philosopher, each in his own way.