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Quotes

Science

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
— Richard Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.
— Richard Feynman

Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
— Arthur Stanley Eddington

Analogy

I've managed to convince myself that analogy is really at the core of thinking — not just for myself, but for other people, too. I'm trying to put forth a vision of thought that involves — if you don't want to say "analogy-making" you can say "stripping away irrelevancies to get at the gist of things." I feel I've discovered something essential about what thinking is, and I'm on a crusade to make it clear to everybody.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Wired 3.11, 1995

Our conceptual networks are intricately structured by analogical and metaphorical mappings, which play a key role in the synchronic construction of meaning and in its diachronic evolution. Parts of such mappings are so entrenched in everyday thought and language that we do not consciously notice them; other parts strike us as novel and creative. The term metaphor is often applied to the latter, highlighting the literary and poetic aspects of the phenomenon. But the general cognitive principles at work are the same, and they play a key role in thought and language at all levels.
— Giles Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Language, 1997

Intelligence is the capacity of the brain to predict the future by analogy to the past.
— Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence, 2004

Life

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
— Logan Pearsall Smith

I have come to the conclusion that my subjective account of my motivation is largely mythical on almost all occasions. I don't know why I do things.
— J.B.S. Haldane

But if you study the logistics
And heuristics of the mystics
You will find that their minds rarely move in a line
So it's much more realistic
To abandon such ballistics
And resign to be trapped on a leaf in a vine.
— Brian Eno, Backwater

Updated: February 3, 2007.