World - Quotes
When the world promises undesirable outcomes, only a fool believes he can alter the latter without first addressing the state of the former.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward predicting events in the future, toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this immense, chaotic universe.
If we give a description of the world that ignores point of view, that is solely "from the outside" - of space, of time, of a subject - we may be able to say many things but we lose certain crucial aspects of the world. Because the world that we have been given is the world seen from within it, not from without.
In the mountains, we see a valley covered by a sea of white clouds. The surface of the clouds gleams, immaculate. We start to walk toward the valley. The air becomes more humid, then less clear; the sky is no longer blue. We find ourselves in a fog. Where did the well-defined surface of the clouds go? It vanished. Its disappearance is gradual; there is no surface that separates the fog from the sparse air of the heights. Was it an illusion? No, it was a view from afar. Come to think of it, it`s like this with all surfaces. This dense marble table would look like a fog if I were shrunk to a small enough, atomic scale. Everything in the world becomes blurred when seen close up. Where exactly does the mountain end and where do the plains begin? Where does the savannah begin and the desert end? We cut the world into large slices. We think of it in terms of concepts that are meaningful for us, that emerge at a certain scale.
The best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.
The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It`s a network of events affecting each other.
The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention... in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.
Our world is more like chess than tic-tac-toe. We can never plan too far ahead; the number of possibilities available to us in our everyday life is too great to contemplate.
People say, "What are you depressed about? You can buy anything you want." I wish everyone in the world was rich so they would realize money isn`t everything.
From the moment we are born we are presented with absolute facts rather than situated ones. We aren`t taught that distinctions such as young and old or healthy and unhealthy are social constructions and that their meaning depends on context. We are conditioned to learn about and see the world as a set of facts, such as 1 + 1 = 2. The world is far more subtle than such facts allow, and we should have learned that 1 + 1=2 only if we are using the base 10 number system, but that it equals 10 if the number system is base 2, and that 1 + 1 = 1 if we are adding one wad of chewing gum to one wad of chewing gum.
Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.