Guy Finley Quotes

Now, as Mandelbrot points out, ... Nature has played a joke on the mathematicians. The 19th-century mathematicians may not have been lacking in imagination, but Nature was not. The same pathological structures that the mathematicians invented to break loose from 19th-century naturalism turn out to be inherent in familiar objects all around us.

Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.

An exquisitely complex shape now known as the Mandlebrot set has been called the most complex object in mathematics.

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.

Yes, fractals are what I want to find in my music.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

Nature creates while destroying, and doesn't care whether it creates or destroys as long as life isn't extinguished, as long as death doesn't lose its rights.

Our life is made by the death of others.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

It's fascinating how life works.

The universe is fractal. The closer you look at it, the more interesting it becomes.

The beauty of compounding iterative algorithms - evolution, fractals, organic growth, art - derives from their irreducibility.

Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

Every you, every me. Fractals. Fractures.

Before birth; yes, what time was it then? A time like now, and when they were dead, it would be still like now: these trees, that sky, this earth, those acorn seeds, sun and wind, all the same, while they, with dust-turned hearts, change only.

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Nature, when left to universal laws, tends to produce regularity out of chaos.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

It's a product of the fractal laws that govern the world at an informational level. There is no deeper truth.

What Im trying to say is that what makes you up, its always been around, and it always will be around. So really the only thing you should worry about is the part you're at right now. Where you got a body and a head and all that bullshit. Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.