Men like Abelard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in concentric systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences.
–Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, tr. Richard and Clara Winston

More from this later, but for now, I just liked the inversion of our–or my–expectations. I mostly hear “thought and art” praised for their “magical expressiveness,” whereas when the sciences get praised on aesthetic grounds it’s usually for their “living beauty”…. I have no idea what this was in the German, and whether the connotations are carried over with any grace or fealty, but I like this sentence as translated.