Beauty

"One may ask the question as to the extent to which the quest for beauty is an aim in the pursuit of science... It is, indeed, an incredible fact that what the human mind, at its deepest and most profound, perceives as beautiful finds its realization in external nature. What is intelligible is also beautiful…Beauty is that to what the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound."

- Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

(1910 - 1995)

Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science

Grey Commotion of Mind

"I do nothing, with as little shame as satisfaction. It is the state that suits me best. I write the odd poem when it is there, that is the only thing worth doing. There is an ecstasy of accidia — will-less in a grey tumult of idées obscures. There is an end to the temptation of light, its polite scorchings & consolations. It is good for children & insects. There is an end of making up one's mind, like a pound of tea, an end of patting the butter of consciousness into opinions. The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgments."

-  Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989)

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 1, 1929-1940

Form

"No permanence is ours;

we are a wave

That flows to fit

whatever form it finds:

Through night or day,

cathedral or the cave

We pass forever,

craving form that binds."

-  Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Shadows

"Henceforth space by itself,

and time by itself,

are doomed to fade away

into mere shadows,

and only a kind of union

of the two will preserve

an independent reality."

- Hermann Minkowski (1864 - 1909)

Sense of Unity

"I think nothing can be compared to the Hills for the elevation of spirit, and peace of mind...All aspects of nature lead to elevation and knowledge when you once have an idea. The commonplace growth of weeds beneath a pile of refuse appear to shine with the divine light when you know the meaning of the world and sense of unity of all things. In a great city the buildings, the machinery, the works of art, everything produced by man, are naught but the material expression of ideas. We look on lines and forms and masses of what we call matter, and we know these things existed in the mind of man in the form of ideas before they were expressed in the physical world in the form of matter. I look on the lines and forms of the mountains and all other aspects of nature as if they were but the vast expression of ideas within the Cosmic Mind, if such it can be called. Without that outlook, I am assured there is nothing in the Universe that is not the expression of mind or of life. The sense of unity is enormously increased."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)

Letter to Virginia Best, Sep 22, 1925
Ansel Adams: Letters, 1916 - 1984

Intimate Presence

"Beginning with these harmonies of the universe that could in some manner be expressed in mathematical equations, an intense scientific mediation on the structure and functioning of the universe was begun by western scientists some centuries ago. Among the insights attained by this meditation has been a sense of the curvature of the universe whereby all things are held together in their intimate presence to each other. This bonding is what makes the universe what it is, not a collection of disparate objects but an intimate presence of all things to each other, each thing sustained in its being by everything else...That the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects is the central commitment of the Ecozoic. Existence itself is derived from and sustained by this intimacy of each being with every other being of the universe."

- Brian Swimme (1950 - ) and Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)

The Universe Story

Reinvigoration

"If we analyze the operations of scenes of beauty upon the mind, and consider the intimate relation of the mind upon the nervous system and the whole physical economy, the action and reaction which constantly occur between bodily and mental conditions, the reinvigoration which results from such scenes is readily comprehended. . . . The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system."

- Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 - 1903)

Earth's Eye

"A lake is a landscape's most

beautiful and expressive feature.

It is Earth's eye;

looking into which the

beholder measures the

depth of his own nature."

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Embedded Patterns

"No pattern is an isolated entity.

Each pattern can exist in the world

only to the extent that is

supported by other patterns:

the larger patterns in

which it is embedded,

the patterns of the same

size that surround it,

and the smaller patterns

which are embedded in it. "

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - )

'Silent' = 'Listen'

"The word 'listen'

contains the same letters

as the word 'silent'."

- Alfred Brendel (1931 - )

Hush of Silence

"Listen closely... 

the eternal hush of silence

goes on and on throughout all this,

and has been going on,

and will go on and on.

This is because the world

is nothing but a dream

and is just thought of

 and the everlasting eternity

pays no attention to it."

- Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969)

Hardly Noticeable

"If you will stay close to nature,

to its simplicity,

to the small things hardly noticeable,

those things can unexpectedly

become great and immeasurable."

- Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet

Crepuscular Cryptographs

"One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Perception of the Infinite

"Thus the perception of the infinite is somehow prior in me to the perception of the finite, that is, my perception of God is prior to my perception of myself. For how would I understand that I doubt and that I desire, that is, that I lack something and that I am not wholly perfect, unless there were some idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I might recognize my defects?"

- René Descartes (1596 - 1650)

The Usayable

"...trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights. Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live as an artist, in the understanding and in one’s creative work."

-  Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
Letters to a Young Poet

Our Quixotic Purpose

"We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe."

-  James Gleick (1954 - )
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The Flow of the Process

"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel... he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men... a good ruler has to learn his world's language... it's different for every world... the language of the rocks and growing things... the language you don't hear just with your ears... the Mystery of Life... not a problem to solve, but a reality to experience... 

Understanding must move with the flow of the process." 

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1920 - 1986)

Become a River

"Become a river and then nothing is needed.

That’s what The Secret of the Golden Flower says:

Achieve inaction through action,

achieve effortlessness through effort.

But first comes the effort, 

the action—it will melt you—and then

the river starts flowing.

In that very flow it has

reached the ocean."

- Osho (1931 - 1990)

Outside World

"As far as I know,

there is no proof whatever

of the existence of an

objective reality apart 

from our senses,

and I do not see why

we should accept the

 outside world as such

solely by virtue

of our senses."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Process

"There is no gap

between us and

the process."

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)