Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. This allowed me to see many more dimensions than if I saw things just through my own eyes.

— Ray Dalio, Principles

So the Big Bang doesn’t actually mark the beginning of our universe; it marks the end of our theoretical understanding.

— Sean Carroll, The Big Picture

…the love of learning seeks something beyond the senses, while the love of spectacle is enticed by the senses themselves…

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

…the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity and uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.

— Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems

For the desire to prolong youthfulness is not only a childish desire to eat one’s life and keep it; it is also an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.

— Leon R. Kass, L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?