Ben Orlin > Quotes

“Creativity is what happens when a mind encounters an obstacle. It’s the human process of finding a way through, over, around, or beneath. No obstacle, no creativity.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Reality is a lovely starting point, but the coolest destinations lie far beyond it.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“It is a funny paradox of design: utility breeds beauty. There is elegance in efficiency, a visual pleasure in things that just barely work.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Filling a mind with facts is not like filling a vessel with water. For anyone with a worldview—that is, anyone with a pulse—assimilation is an active process.”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games―And Why They Matter

“Mathematics can instruct us on how to optimize. But what to optimize—that remains a question for humans.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Paradox is the grain of sand that helps form the pearl of theory.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“The secret to our brilliance is that we never stop learning, and the secret to our learning is that we never stop playing.”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games―And Why They Matter

“All the world's a differential equation, and the men and women are merely variables.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Why are mathematical games so universal? I truly don't know. But perhaps it's because the universe is so mathematical.”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games―And Why They Matter

“Math is a weave of many threads: the formal and the intuitive, the simple and the profound, the momentary and the eternal. Love the thread you love. But never mistake it for the tapestry.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Science has never been defined by infallibility or superhuman perfection. It has always been about healthy skepticism, about putting every hypothesis to the test.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“To do good work, you’ve first got to engage with nitty-gritty details. Then, to do great work, you’ve got to move beyond them.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“With pendulums and escapements, we carved hours into minutes (the etymology: “a minute fraction of an hour”), and thence into seconds (as in “a second order” of tiny; a minute fraction of a minute).”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“There are two kinds of people in life: those who like crude dualities and those who do not.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“History is the sum of the people living it.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Psychological insurance can quickly turn predatory. When we buy protection against fear itself, we invite companies to make us afraid.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“What is,” said the philosopher Parmenides, not quite a million days ago, “is uncreated and indestructible, alone, complete, immovable and without end.” It’s a bold philosophy. Parmenides permitted no divisions, no distinctions, no future, no past. “Nor was it ever, nor will it be,” he explained; “for now it is, all at once, a continuous one.” To Parmenides, the universe was like Los Angeles traffic: eternal, singular, and unchanging. A million days later, it remains a very stupid idea.”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Hello! You are a Mission: Impossible agent. You dangle from ceilings into locked vaults, cling via suction cup to skyscrapers, and unmask your true identity to the double-crossers you’ve just triple-crossed. Also, you do not seem to get what “impossible” means. “Impossible” does not mean “as routine as a quarterly earnings report.” Nor does it mean “very rare” or “rather difficult” or “whew, it’s a good thing that knife blade halted a millimeter from Tom Cruise’s eye.” It means “not possible.” And yet it keeps happening. Your film’s title is as dishonest as its theme song is catchy.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a’s, three b’s, four c’s, four d’s, forty-six e’s, sixteen f’s, four g’s, thirteen h’s, fifteen i’s, two k’s, nine l’s, four m’s, twenty-five n’s, twenty-four o’s, five p’s, sixteen r’s, forty-one s’s, thirty-seven t’s, ten u’s, eight v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, eleven y’s, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !” —Lee Sallows”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games—And Why They Matter

“If you ditch the rulebook, you lose the grace. Even the wacky, avant-garde, convention-defying arts—experimental film, expressionist painting, professional wrestling—draw their power from playing against the limitations of the chosen medium.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Psychology: it's sociology for sociopaths.”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“Most wrong beliefs cost you nothing. Flat earthers can still buy plane tickets; doubters of the moon landing can still stargaze;”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games—And Why They Matter

“Most mathematics is less about solving someone else’s riddles than about devising your own, exploring which constraints produce interesting games and which produce drab ones. Eventually, this process of rule tweaking, of moving from game to game, comes to feel like a grand never-ending game in itself.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“To your credit, it takes patience to survive all the twists and turns. But it takes a more profound patience to keep thinking afterward.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lampposts—for support rather than illumination,” said Andrew Lang.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“To miss the forest for the trees – that phrase is strange to me. How can you miss the forest when there’s one in every tree? –Robert Frost, probably”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games—And Why They Matter

“Here’s a tough-love life lesson: just because you set your mind to something doesn’t mean you can do it.
Say you’re creating a square, and you want its diagonal to be the same length as its sides. Well, I hate to break it to you, but that’s not how squares work.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“As prince of paradox Yogi Berra observed, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded now.”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

“A mathematician who can’t convey his thinking will suffer the same fate that I did that day: to be a lonely island of thought, whose ideas never reach other shores, while the mathematician who can share her truth enjoys a hero’s welcome from the grateful crowd.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings