#ems

The machines are too dull when we are lion-poems that move & breathe. ↗

— Michael McClure

#lion #machines #nature #poems #poetry

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable. ↗

— Howard Pattee

#philosophy #science #systems #nature

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. ↗

— Erica Jong

#religions #systems #religion

Religion which takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#solving-problems #religion

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#art #criticism #desire #films #gravity

Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity. ↗

— Lewis Fry Richardson

#science #systems #science

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water. ↗

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

#science #systems #science

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#metaphor #science #sea-lion #snail #systems-analyst

Evolution seems to close the heart to some of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest guesses advanced in the name of science. ↗

— William Jennings Bryan

#close #evolution #guesses #heart #mind

I stabbed you. With a massive sword. You caught on fire." His lips twitched, almost imperceptibly. "Okay, so maybe our problems aren't like other couples. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#jace #repartee #problems