Sam Hollström

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Man does not like to think his history is short, but so it is; so short that it is the merest instant in the Earth's history. To see this, to put man's life in context with the Earth's, imagine the whole history of the Earth compressed into the six-day week of the Biblical Creation; a scale that makes eight thousand years pass in a single second. The first day and a half of this week is too early for life, which does not appear until about Tuesday noon. During the rest of Tuesday, and also Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and well into Saturday, life expands and transforms the planet: life becomes more diverse, more stable, more beautiful; life makes a home for itself and adapts itself to live there. At four in the afternoon on Saturday, the age of reptiles comes onstage; at nine in the evening it goes offstage, but pelicans and redwoods are already here, lifeforms now threatened by man's wish to have the whole world to himself.

Man does not appear on the Earth until three minutes before Saturday midnight. A second before midnight, man the hunter becomes man the farmer, and wandering tribesmen become villagers. Two-fifths of a second before midnight, Tutankhamon rules Egypt. A third of a second before midnight, Kong Fuzi and Gautama Buddha walk the Earth. A fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution begins. It is midnight now, and some people are saying we can go on at the rate that has worked for this fortieth of a second, because we know all the answers. Do we really know that much?”
― Amory Lovins

“a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total.”
― Robert Sheckley, Immortality Inc.

“Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.”
― Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad