What if there is no way the world should be and no way the world shouldn’t be? What if the world just shows up the way the world shows up? What if the great opportunity of life isn’t in trying to get the world to be a certain way, but rather in learning from whatever the world gives us? What if curiosity and learning are really the big game, not being right about how things should be?

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

You can tell who the real artists are not only by their prodigious output but also by their stack of failed experiments, their overflowing bookcases, and the way their eyes get all crazy when they talk about the minutia of their avocation.

— Brennen Reece, Productivity for the Depressive Polymath

“A great truth,” Bohr liked to say, “is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.”

— Martin Gardner, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

…the real purpose of society, which is not to create an ideal person, but to create a semi-robot who mimics the society as closely as possible…

— Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness—not because nature strives for disorder, but because there are so many more ways of being disorderly than of being orderly.

— Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now