In some strange way, any new fact or insight that I may have found has not seemed to me as a "discovery' of mine, but rather as something that had always been there and that I had chanced to pick up.

And, it is often the case that the most "important" discovery of a scientist is his first. In contrast, the deepest creation of an artist is equally often his last. I continue to be puzzled by this dichotomy.

The basic concepts gained their validity in proporation to the extent of the domain of natural phenomena which can be explained in terms of them.[...] Scientific values consist in the continual and increasing recognition of the uniformity of nature.[...] In other words, a scientist seeks continually to extend the domain of validity of certain basic concepts.