"The head is separate; the hand is separate. Body and mind are separate.
The hand is a mirror for the mind – wrap your arm over your head, lodging your elbow behind and grabbing your chin with your hand. The act is now complete. Held, you are holding. You are object and subject, viewed and voyeur."
“He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha, instead he saw other faces, many, a long sequence, a flowing river of faces, of hundreds, of thousands, which all came and disappeared, and yet all seemed to be there simultaneously, which constantly changed and renewed themselves, and which were still all Siddhartha...he saw all of these figures and faces in a thousand relationships with one another, each one helping the other, loving it, hating it, destroying it, giving re-birth to it, each one was a will to die, a passionately painful confession of transitoriness, and yet none of them died, each one only transformed, was always re-born, received evermore a new face, without any time having passed between the one and the other face— and all of these figures and faces rested, flowed, generated themselves, floated along and merged with each other, and they were all constantly covered by something thin, without individuality of its own, but existing, like a thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, a shell or mold or mask of water, and this mask was smiling, and this mask was Siddhartha’s smiling face...”
“What did you expect? he murmured. Time passes.”
“Objects make up the substance of the world...Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration is what is changing and unstable. The configuration of objects produces states of affairs...In a state of affairs objects stand in a determinate relation to one another...The totality of existing states of affairs is the world”.
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
"The need to indite, inscribe – be its fulfillment exhilarating or palliative or, as is more usual, neither – springs from the doubly-bound panic felt by most persons who spend a lot of time up in their own personal heads...the need to get the words & voices not only out – outside the sixteen-inch diameter of both that both births and imprisons them - but also down...a necessary affirmation of an outside, some Exterior one’s written record can not only communicate with but inhabit...”I EXIST” is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing - & all good writing.""
“My life, I resolved, ought to be a perpetual transcending, a progression from stage to stage; I wanted it to pass through one area after the next, leaving each behind, as music moves on from theme to theme, from tempo to tempo, playing each out to the end, completing each and leaving it behind, never tiring, never sleeping, forever wakeful, forever in the present. In connection with the experiences of awakening, I had noticed that such stages and such areas exist, and that each successive period in one’s life bears within itself, as it is approaching its end, a note of fading and eagerness for death. That in turn leads to a shifting to a new area, to awakening and new beginnings.”
“Art, therefore, becomes for Stephen a way of rewriting his experiences and anaesthetising his encounters...”
“He would share conjectures because his goal was not to be the first to prove something...rather his goal was to see that somebody proved it – with or without him.”
“Erdos contributed an enormous amount to mathematics...but for me his even greater importance is that he created a large number of mathematicians...He was the problem poser par excellence...When we are fumbling with our research, it is because we are not asking the right question...Erdos not only asked the right question. He asked them of the right person. He knew better than you yourself knew what you were capable of...He gave the confidence that many of us needed to embark on mathematical research.”
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
“In his letter, Langlands proposed the possibility of a deep analogy between two theories that seemed to lie at opposite ends of the mathematical cosmos: the theory of Galois groups, which concerns symmetries in the realm of numbers, and “harmonic analysis”, which concerns how complicated waves are build up from simple harmonies. Certain structures in the harmonic world “knew” about mysterious patterns in the world of numbers This is might be possible to use the methods of one world to reveal hidden harmonies in the other – so Langlands conjectured. If Weil did not find the intuitions in the letter persuasive, Langlands added, “I am sure you have a waste basket handy”.”
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
“It’s not much fun to be misunderstood or criticized, but rather a painful experience that hurts people deeply. As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve gradually come to the realization that this kind of pain and hurt is a necessary part of life. If you think about it, it’s precisely because people are different from others that they’re able to create their own independent selves...the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent."
"...each turn of a mobile is "an inspiration of the moment. In it you can discern the theme composed by its maker, but the mobile weaves a thousant variations on it. It is a little like a hot-jazz tune, unique and emphemeral, like the sky in the morning"...his mobiles are "lyrical inventions" that help us see the universe as a beautiful mix of predictable patterns and unexpected pivots".