Avaneesh

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”
― Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
― Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
― Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

“People think of education as something that they can finish. And what’s more, when they finish, it’s a rite of passage. You’re finished with school. You’re no more a child, and therefore anything that reminds you of school - reading books, having ideas, asking questions - that’s kid’s stuff. Now you’re an adult, you don’t do that sort of thing any more.

You have everybody looking forward to no longer learning, and you make them ashamed afterward of going back to learning. If you have a system of education using computers, then anyone, any age, can learn by himself, can continue to be interested. If you enjoy learning, there’s no reason why you should stop at a given age. People don’t stop things they enjoy doing just because they reach a certain age.

What’s exciting is the actual process of broadening yourself, of knowing there’s now a little extra facet of the universe you know about and can think about and can understand. It seems to me that when it’s time to die, there would be a certain pleasure in thinking that you had utilized your life well, learned as much as you could, gathered in as much as possible of the universe, and enjoyed it. There’s only this one universe and only this one lifetime to try to grasp it. And while it is inconceivable that anyone can grasp more than a tiny portion of it, at least you can do that much. What a tragedy just to pass through and get nothing out of it.”
― Isaac Asimov