Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.

What is there in this big wide world for a man to talk about with certainty besides his homeland, home and family?

Turn you dream machine on and create the world you wish to experience through your imagination.

We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.

Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job.

Humility means one does not impose his conceptions upon others and he is fully dependent on the mercy of the Lord.

What first attracted me to doing Swiss Army Man was just how mental it was - how insane and wonderful and original the script was.

My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.