Quality of Beauty

"...the supreme quality of beauty being 

a light from some other world is the idea ... 

... that the matter is but a shadow, 

the reality of which it is but the symbol."

- James Joyce (1882 - 1941)

Complex Tapestry

"Its substance was known to me. The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry…each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the aether. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept..."

- China Miéville (1972 - )

A Dance of Interacting Parts

"We have been trained to think of patterns, with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. It is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. In truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts and only secondarily pegged down by various sorts of physical limits and by those limits which organisms characteristically impose."

- Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1990)

Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

Metaphysical Speculation

"There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations."

- Leonard Susskind (1940 - )

Probabilities

"In the beginning there

were only probabilities.

The universe could only

come into existence

if someone observed it.

It does not matter that the observers

turned up several billion years later.

The universe exists because

we are aware of it."

- Martin Rees (1942 - )

Coexistence

"There is a constant and

intimate contact among the

things that coexist and co-evolve

in the universe;

 a sharing of bonds and

messages that makes reality

into a stupendous network

of interaction and communication."

- Ervin Laszlo (1932 - )

Rhymes

"There is no closed figure in nature

Every shape participates with another.

No one thing is independent of another,

and one thing rhymes with another,

and light gives them shape."

- Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - 2004)