Aspirations

“To look where all have looked and see what none have seen.”
This is the holy grail of mathematics.
The pinnacle of achievement for the research mathematician or scientist.

Those who actually achieve it are often among its more modest practitioners.
I think that the most beutiful of these statements of modesty originated with Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century.
The best version of it that I know is Isaac Newton's tribute to Galileo Galilei and others.
"If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

Another famous statement of Newton's is:
"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."