You can make the case that all creative endeavors are about pushing against constraints. In the words of physicist Richard Feynman, “Creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.”

— Ben Orlin, Math With Bad Drawings

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.

— George Orwell,, Down and Out in Paris and London…

…find out what they’re excited about. That’s kind of a basic threshold for me. And it doesn’t matter whether it has anything to do with programming or computers. If they can’t get enthusiastic about something, they’re not going to get charged up in a group.

— Peter Seibel, Coders at Work

The history of Earth up until now has been a history of optimizers spinning their wheels at a constant rate, generating a constant optimization pressure. And creating optimized products, not at a constant rate, but at an accelerating rate, because of how object-level innovations open up the pathway to other object-level innovations. But that acceleration is taking place with a protected meta level doing the actual optimizing.

— Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate

Schrödinger was the first of the quantum theoreticians to express sympathy with the Upanishads and eastern philosophical thought. A growing body of literature now embodies this perspective, including two popular works, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and the Dancing Wu Li masters by Gary Zukav.

— Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I