Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren’t equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it’s just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.

In the beginning of the year 1665, I found the method of approximating series and the rule for reducing any dignity of any binomial into such a series.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

I was brought up to understand Darwin’s theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

There is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

The formula ‚Two and two make five‘ is not without its attractions.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn’t work today.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.

I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

Independence is a heady draught, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

If the tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a beast in the forest.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Everything has changed, and nothing has changed more than the world of fashion.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

No matter what engineering field you’re in, you learn the same basic science and mathematics. And then maybe you learn a little bit about how to apply it.

Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

One thing I’ve tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

I’ve got the brain of a four year old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.

It is generally recognised that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multi-tasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

We must accept what science tells us, that man was born from the earth. But, more logical than the scientists who lecture us, we must carry this lesson to its conclusion: that is to say, accept that man was born entirely from the world – not only his flesh and bones but his incredible power of thought.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.

The brain is wider than the sky.

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

The quantity and quality of consciousness, one may say, have always been growing throughout geological times. In this respect man, in whom nervous organisation and therefore psychological powers have attained an undisputed maximum, may be considered, scientifically, as a natural centre of evolution of the primates.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

In the literal sense, there has been no relevant evolution since the trek from Africa. But there has been substantial progress towards higher standards of rights, justice and freedom – along with all too many illustrations of how remote is the goal of a decent society.