42+ James Gleick Quotes On Knowledge, Education And Universe

James Gleick is an American author and journalist. He is best known for his biographies of scientists such as Richard Feynman, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. He has also written books on topics such as chaos theory and the information age. Following is our collection on famous quotes by James Gleick on leadership, life, knowledge.

Top 10 James Gleick Quotes

1. Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
2. It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
3. Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
4. When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
5. Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.
6. Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
7. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
8. Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
9. We choose mania over boredom every time.
10. The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

James Gleick Short Quotes

• The universe is computing its own destiny.
• In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
• To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.
• Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
• Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
• Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.
• You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.
• Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
• Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
• The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.

James Gleick Famous Quotes And Sayings

For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket. — James Gleick

"Half genius and half buffoon," Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science. — James Gleick

He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing. — James Gleick

The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice. — James Gleick

Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist. ... The unfamiliar and the strange - these are the domain of all children and scientists. — James Gleick

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice. — James Gleick

It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover. — James Gleick

Intuition was not just visual but also auditory and kinesthetic. Those who watched Feynman in moments of intense concentration came away with a strong, even disturbing sense of the physicality of the process, as though his brain did not stop with the grey matter but extended through every muscle in his body. — James Gleick

The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. — James Gleick

Running for president is the new selfie. — James Gleick

We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist. — James Gleick

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York. — James Gleick

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human. — James Gleick

The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism. — James Gleick

Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic. — James Gleick

I have seen the future, and it is still in the future. — James Gleick

It is not true that people who accomplish things don't waste time and that people who waste time don't accomplish things. The very concept is ill-informed. You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment. — James Gleick

The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong — James Gleick

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good. — James Gleick

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects. — James Gleick

The Internet has taken shape with startlingly little planning? The most universal and indispensable network on the planet somehow burgeoned without so muchasa boardofdirectors, never minda mergers-and- acquisitions department. There is a paradoxical lesson here for strategists. In economic terms, the great corporations are acting like socialist planners, while old- fashioned free-market capitalism blossoms at their feet. — James Gleick

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had. — James Gleick

Life Lessons by James Gleick

1. James Gleick's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the complexity of the world around us and the power of technology to shape our lives.
2. He encourages readers to think critically and to be mindful of the potential consequences of our actions.
3. He also highlights the importance of taking time to appreciate the beauty of the natural world and the power of creativity.