Kary Mullis Quotes

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning, boys. How's the water?' And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'

You mean you live down here?' Matilda asked. 'I do', Miss Honey replied, but she said no more. Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again.

Fish are not the best authority on water.

The fish will be the last to discover water.

I observe the world and the people surrounding me.

Awareness is becoming acquainted with environment, no matter where one happens to be.

As the fish doesn't know water, people are ignorant of space. Consciousness is concerned only with changing and varying details; it ignores constants-especially constant backgrounds. Thus only very exceptional people are aware of what is basic to everything.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

… looking and not seeing things was a great sin.

You can tell a dumb guy a mile away.

The one thing I try to do with everything I write is open people's eyes to those they normally ignore or dismiss. To make people aware of the "other" side of things. That someone's circumstances may not be what you think they are or what they show to the world.

We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

Two young salmon are swimming along one day. As they do, they are passed by a wiser, older fish coming the other way. The wiser fish greets the two as he passes, saying, "Morning boys, how's the water?" The other two continue to swim in silence for a little while, until the first one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"

People can be stunningly unobservant.

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

We are surrounded by story.

You wouldn't know a clue if it danced in front of you with a T-Shirt that read 'I'm a clue

... not talking about things she doesn't understand to people who do or about things she does to people who don't.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.

I think - I think - I think how little they think what lies so near them.

Just because you know doesn't mean they know.

Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see.

I am ashamed of anyone who has eyes and still can't see.

I looked at him like he was an idiot, but he didn’t notice. Or maybe he got it so often, he thought that was how people looked at him.