James Gleick Quotes

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.

It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.

Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.

We choose mania over boredom every time.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

Running for president is the new selfie.

The universe is computing its own destiny.

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong

The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do, " The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.