Douglas Hofstadter Quotes

Irrationality is the square root of all evil.

It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.

In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.

If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don't have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I'm a little more respectful of ants.

There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.

You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level

The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.

No reference is truly direct — every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

Reductionism is merciless.

The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.

Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.

I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.

The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.

The Strange Loop phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done.

I don't feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.

You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated 'you' makes more decisions, and so forth, 'round and 'round.

This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.

The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.

This sentence contradicts itself - no actually it doesn't.

I am the thought you are now thinking.

The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.

No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over... the Zen attitude is that words and truth are incompatible, or at least that no words can capture truth.

One of the most important and fascinating of all computer languages is Lisp (standing for "List Processing"), which was invented by John McCarthy around the time Algol was invented.

Since, as is well know, God helps those who help themselves, presumably the Devil helps all those, and only those, who don't help themselves. Does the Devil help himself?