"Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition."

"I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with—that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational “thinking” areas of our brains are superrationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them both to ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others. “The hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge [as an explanation of nature] is as faith-based as intelligent design,” says Leonard Susskind, inventor of string theory."

"The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day."

"At present, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP."

"I should like to recommend to [the reader]…that he gaze long and philosophically one afternoon in spring at the azure of the sky, on a day wholly without clouds and preferably in a Mediterranean country. Then he will observe that this azure is composed, as it were, of a precious substance which eludes his rational faculties, for at the same time that it will apear to him to be made up of an infinitely smooth and hard substance, like an agate sphere, this homogeneity, so opaque and materially corporeal, will seem luminous and as if composed of transparency and of spirituality itself. And in this the sensations just described will be in accord with physics, since the hardness and the violence, so to speak, of such an azure are constituted of nothing but infinite layers of superposed transparent air. Exactly the same thing is true of a beautiful pictorial matter. [A color existing as a beautiful and transcendant pictorial matter]…is constituted and formed, like the very azure of the sky which serves as our example, by a succession of subtle, quasi-spiritual and infinitely fine successive layers, as transparent as possible, and for the obtaining of which the magic of media intervenes."

"The intellectual picture of the atmosphere of craftsmanship from which the storyteller comes has perhaps never been sketched in such a significant way as by Paul Valéry. “He speaks of the perfect things in nature, flawless pearls, full-bodied, matured wines, truly developed creatures, and calls them ‘the precious product of a long chain of causes similar to one another.’” The accumulation of such causes has its temporal limit only at perfection. “This patient process of Nature,” Valéry continues, “was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are placed one on top of the other - all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."

"Gone to sleep with the thought that my life should really begin tomorrow or the day after - or the day after that - but soon (that, at least, is certain and ineluctable)."