Paul Auster Quotes

As far as I'm concerned, there is only one study and that is the way in which things relate to one another.

Consider frequently the connection of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For things are somehow implicated with one another, and all in a way friendly to one another.

Phenomena intersect; to see but one is to see nothing.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

If everything in the universe depends upon everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

And the whole is greater than the part.

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.

World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. but nothing is self-contained.

I love the interrelatedness of things.

Modern physics has taught us that the nature of any system cannot be discovered by dividing it into its component parts and studying each part by itself... We must keep our attention fixed on the whole and on the interconnection between the parts. The same is true of our intellectual life. It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

When a poet writes a poem, meaning arises - because the poet is not alone; he has created something. When a dancer dances, meaning arises. When a mother gives birth to a child, meaning arises. Left alone, cut off from everything else, isolated like an island, you are meaningless. Joined together you are meaningful. The bigger the whole, the bigger is the meaning.

Everything...affects everything

It's all connected. When you save any part of the world, you've saved the whole world. In fact, that's the only way it can be done.

Whenever we look at life, we look at networks.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement

Only a system in which all parts flourish is holistic.

Each portion of matter may be conceived of as a garden full of plants, and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond.

In nature nothing exists alone.

We now realize that we're not living in a piecemeal world, but a world where everything is linked together.

Culture consists of connections, not of separations: to specialize is to isolate.