Martin Rees Quotes

I love insects. They are amazing.

I really liked insects - all kinds: flies, grasshoppers, weevils.

Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

[Insects] are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship.

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they're the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

I don't only write about English literature; I also write about chaos theory and... ants. I can understand ants.

I love all kinds of insects, and I've heard Australia has some really interesting bugs.

To me it's still a greater miracle when a fly flies than when a human being undertakes to do so.

Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

The more we understand what happens in living cells, the more incredibly powerful you realize things can be when they work from the bottom up, by interaction of one molecule and another.

We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.

Of all bugs, growing up I just loved the pill bugs. They roll up, you play with them, you wait for them to open up, and then when you touch them they roll up again. I just love that.

From time immemorial, man has desired to comprehend the complexity of nature in terms of as few elementary concepts as possible.

I can pretty much name and rattle off the genus and species of all the bugs you see in everyday life.

Ants are a curious race

To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis.

What I've observed, and I think it's fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this, what I've observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle.

Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness.