Browse Quotes

618 quotes in the collection

• Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell that can grow as large as a bath mat,…

  Lacy M. Johnson

• Monocausotaxophilia : the love of single causes that explain everything

  Ernst Pöppel

• There are two types of listeners: those that listen, and those that wait to talk.

  Sean Kernan

• Do a little life math. If you are the common denominator in a series of repeating problems it’s probably you.

  Sean Kernan

• Do unto ecosystems as you would have them do unto you.

  Douglas Chadwick

• One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

  Ecclesiastes 1:4

• In the desert there is everything and there is nothing. Stay curious. Know where you are–your biological address. Get to know your neighbors–plants, creatures, who lives there, who is blessed, cursed, what is absent or in danger or in need…

  Ellen Meloy

• The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better.

  Douglas Engelbart

• We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg, perhaps a poem staggers us with the awful, awe-filled wonder of aliveness, the sheer luck of it against the…

  Maria Popova

• Language wants to clutch, corral, and fence; to constrain, tame, and neaten the tangled wild. And that makes the tangled wild mad as a caged wolverine.

  Charles Foster

• Humanity has spent thousands of years building the social organizations and technological mastery to insulate itself from the whims of nature.

  Ezra Klein

• We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

  Aldo Leopold

• Never has so much been spent by so few for so little. (In reference to Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight to near space on 7/11/21)

  Harry Eagar

• So, in the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option: I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.

  Andy Weir, The Martian

• One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counter-invention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history…

  Matt Ridley

• The future will be far more surprising than most people realize.

  Ray Kurzweil

• If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty. In order to keep up with the world…

  Yuval Noah Harari

• But the reality is that for all we’ve learned and all we know, we have literally forgotten the most essential thing of all: we have forgotten how to live on this Earth. I mean this in a literal, existential, and ecological sense. I mean that we…

  Usha Alexander

• We have no choice but to deal with the future. It’s already here, washing into every crevice of our lives. We use technology to escape the stress caused by technology. We create new tech to solve the problems of old tech, which cause new problems.…

  Jessica Wildfire

• We now have the technological tools to quite literally code nature, and the payoff to human flourishing will be profound.

  Marc Andreessen