Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
As for the passions and studies of the mind, avoid envy, anxious fears, anger fretting inwards, subtle and knotty inquisitions, joys and exhilarations in excess, sadness not communicated. Entertain hopes, mirth rather than joy, variety of delights rather than surfeit of them, wonder and admiration (and therefore novelties), studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects (as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature).
"Of Regiment of Health"
To see the world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower; / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour.
"Auguries of Innocence"
The world will never starve for wonders; but only for want of wonder.
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions -- the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
To live by medicine is to live horribly.
It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.
The Hill of Dreams
So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely the idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate foundations of the universe. I believe we can abandon this idea without any regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only above us in the large but also below us in the small.
Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences.
Infinite in All Directions
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.
Worlds may freeze and suns may perish, but there stirs something within us now that can never die again.
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.
The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be...
I don't mind occasionally having to reinvent a wheel; I don't even mind using someone's reinvented wheel occasionally. But it helps a lot if it is symmetric, contains no fewer than ten sides, and has the axle centered. I do tire of trapezoidal wheels with offset axles.
... men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and move towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.
The Discourses
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
"On Running After Ones Hat", in All Things Considered
... equally it appeared to us as unreasoning Creativity, at once blind and subtle, tender and cruel, caring only to spawn and spawn the infinite variety of beings, conceiving here and there among a thousand inanities a fragile loveliness.
Star Maker
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
For the difference between art and entertainment is, finally, one not so much of direction as of degree: though all entertainment is not art, all art must include entertainment. "Entertaining" means interest-holding, and what bores and fails to involve has no real artistic value. Granted, art makes demands; it entertains those who are willing and able to feel, perceive, and think more deeply and arduously -- more courageously if you will -- rather than those who always want to leave their thoughts behind, most likely because thought has abandoned them.
MAN: But I am a man.
WOMAN: Yes, to a degree. That is a trifle abnormal. But not insurmountable.
"But What Have You Done For Me Lately"
The greatest damage done by advertising is precisely that it incessantly demonstrates the prostitution of men and women who lend their intellects, their voices, their artistic skills to purposes in which they themselves do not believe and that it teaches the essential meaninglessness of all creations of the mind; words, images and ideas.
... there are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the [3.6 million year old] fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the palaeontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.
Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination, if that does not sound too pretentious, and I suppose becomes a character -- a living being -- within each of my books. Perhaps I am writing its history, or biography, by indirection -- certainly I think, all of my books, biography and fiction alike, are single chapters in the book which will only be completed at the time of my death. Then I hope the city itself will be seen as a metaphor for the nature of time and the presence of the past in human affairs.
In an interview in October 1998
We owed so much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
Great Expectations
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
I should be able to whisper something in your ear, even if your ear is 1000 miles away, and the government disagrees with that. [GQ magazine in England] quoted me on that -- they changed one letter. It said I should be able to whisper something in your car, even though I am 1000 miles away. I wonder what the people in England think of me.
Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.
First Meditation
A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamed of by its author.
... the social sciences were for all those who had not yet decided what to do with their lives, and for all those whose premature frustrations led them into the sterile alleys of confrontation.
Dear Me
Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
Tempest-Tost
I have a friend who told me that the greatest computer system ever built by mankind was by the Druids at Stonehenge. Well, that's an old story. But what I like was that he felt that the Druids didn't die out, they just went bankrupt trying to debug the software.
Romans disapproved of Greek sports because the athletes competed nude. That was shocking. On the other hand, people dripping with blood and dying for entertainment was fine. This is strangely similar to the moral standards of today's commercial television and family movies.
On Equilibrium
We tend to idealize tolerance, then wonder why we find ourselves infested with losers and nut cases.
However, we must not lose sign of the fact that to digitize ideas, there first must be ideas. Consequently, creativity and imagination -- or whatever stimulates them -- must stop being the privileges of a precious few and become important parts of values that need to be promoted in every order of life -- not just in education.
"Rites, Rituals, and the Passage of Time: Change in a Technological Age", in On The Internet, September/October 1998