From Parts to Wholes (Unsourced)

"By the word symmetry […] one thinks of an external relationship between pleasing parts of a whole; mostly the word is used to refer to parts arranged regularly against one another around a centre. We have […] observed [these parts] one after the other, not always like following like, but rather a raising up from below, a strength out of weakness, a beauty out of ordinariness." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

"Every part is disposed to unite with the whole, that it may thereby escape from its own incompleteness." (Leonardo Da Vinci)

"If nature leads to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty - to forms that no one has previously encountered - we cannot help thinking that they are true and that they revealed genuine features of Nature." (Werner K Heisenberg)

"There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality." (Werner Heisenberg)

"The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection." (Leonardo Da Vinci)

"The whole is simpler than its parts." (Josiah W Gibbs)

"Whatever Nature undertakes, she can only accomplish it in a sequence. She never makes a leap. For example she could not produce a horse if it were not preceded by all the other animals on which she ascends to the horse’s structure as if on the rungs of a ladder. Thus every one thing exists for the sake of all things and all for the sake of one; for the one is of course the all as well. Nature, despite her seeming diversity, is always a unity, a whole; and thus, when she manifests herself in any part of that whole, the rest must serve as a basis for that particular manifestation, and the latter must have a relationship to the rest of the system." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)