This quotation, copied from an exhibition in Budapest, seems a neat summary of the similar qualities needed to make a (great) scientist or a (great) artist.

It also reminded me of a quotation from Thoreau’s journal in which his attempts to keep poetry and facts tidily separated in different notebooks are scrambled by the poetry of beautiful facts.

For another view of the connection between science and art, see this quotation on a wall at EPFL.  

‘A scientist is the more outstanding, the more he shares with the artist, and vice versa. Without intuition and imagination a scholar can at best be the hodman of his discipline. An artist, in turn, will get stuck on the periphery of art without a strict internal order and structuring logic.’

Source: Zoltán Kodály, address to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1948 – quoted in an exhibition in Budapest, May 2018

Photo credit: Annie Spratt at unsplash.com