Science Quote by Herbert Simon

"One finds limits by pushing them" reads like a lab note that accidentally doubles as a life philosophy, which is fitting for Herbert Simon: a scientist of bounded rationality who spent his career mapping what humans can and cannot do.

The line’s intent is pragmatic, not motivational. It argues that constraints are rarely visible in advance; they reveal themselves only under strain. In engineering and science, you don’t discover a system’s failure modes by admiring its design on paper. You stress-test it. You prototype, overload, iterate, watch where it buckles. Simon is smuggling a methodological claim into a deceptively simple sentence: knowledge isn’t just accumulated; it’s provoked.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to armchair certainty. People love to declare what’s “possible” based on intuition, tradition, or institutional habit. Simon suggests those pronouncements are often unearned. Limits are empirical, not rhetorical. You locate them through action - and you also learn whether the supposed limit was real or just an inherited boundary dressed up as common sense.

Context matters: Simon worked across economics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, fields where the myth of perfect optimization collapses on contact with reality. “Pushing” here isn’t reckless transgression; it’s disciplined exploration. Under bounded rationality, you can’t compute the best move in the abstract. You search, you satisfice, you test the edges of your attention, memory, time, and tools.

It’s a sentence that flatters effort, but its deeper power is epistemic: it tells you how to turn ambition into evidence.