Fractal geometry is everywhere, even in lines drawn in the sand. It's the cycle of life... You see fractals in plants, in flowers. Within the human lung are branches within branches.
Planets that don't currently sport plate tectonics, such as Venus and Mars, are scarcely habitable. Tectonics might be a requirement of any world that aspires to a rich diversity of life.
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.
was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it—against reason—as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience…
The task is...not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
The simplicities of natural laws arise through the complexities of the language we use for their expression.
The fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn't scare me at all. There's no reason why one should be scared.
Everyone knows what a curve is, until he has studied enough mathematics to become confused through the countless number of possible exceptions.
Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
Smiling always with a never fading serenity of countenance, and flourishing in an immortal youth.
It is safe to make a choice of your thoughts, scarcely ever safe to express them all.
When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?
People don't walk away from their homes unless they can't make the payments. That's an indication that we are in a recession.
The reality is that I'm making better wine than I thought I would. The whole process is simple but beautiful.
I am an astronomer, and my job is to look to the heavens to better understand the universe and our place in it.
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
