Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound. Eduard Hanslick
The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them. Hermann Ebbinghaus
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind. Norman Mailer
The best standardisation committee in the world is nature herself, but in nature standardisation occurs mainly in connection with the smallest possible units: cells. The result is millions of flexible combinations in which one never encounters the stereotyped. Alvar Aalto
The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language. Anton Chekhov
In the hands of Science and indomitable energy, results the most gigantic and absorbing may be wrought out by skilful combinations of acknowledged data and the simplest means. George Biddell Airy