James Gleick Quotes

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious tha...

Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we wi...

The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York R...

We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want enter...

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, t...

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balance...

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow ...

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can...

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. Th...

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever ...

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a ...

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. ...

It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might...

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the wa...

Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its ru...

the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is...

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober...

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the bus...

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human...

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free ...

It’s not an academic question any more to ask what’s going to happen to a cloud. People very much wa...

the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ide...

One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact ...

the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot...