Marvin Minsky Quotes

I don't know how to depict intelligence.

If you understand something well, you can represent it, describe it, embody it in several ways. Indeed, if you can only present it in one way, then your own mastery is likely to be tenuous.

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Knowledge, may it be said, is higher than magic and is more to be sought. It is quite possible to see what is happening and yet not know what is forward, for while seeing is believing, it does not follow that either seeing or believing is knowing.

When you are there, you are. With words, you aren't.

Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible.

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

Wisdom is knowing when you can't be wise.

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.

If I don't have wisdom, I can teach you only ignorance.

I can't predict the future.

We will never have 100 percent certainty except in hindsight.

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.

If intelligence is the triumph of life, the spoken word is the marvellous means by which this intelligence is manifested.

I can only do the best I can from what I read from the book, and hopefully it translates on camera.

Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

And therefore in geometry (which is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind), men begin at settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations, they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

Within the extent of your knowledge, you are right.

I don't consider myself an expert in the why.

The Reader may here observe the Force of Numbers, which can be successfully applied, even to those things, which one would imagine are subject to no Rules. There are very few things which we know, which are not capable of being reduc'd to a Mathematical Reasoning, and when they cannot, it's a sign our Knowledge of them is very small and confus'd; and where a mathematical reasoning can be had, it's as great folly to make use of any other, as to grope for a thing in the dark when you have a Candle standing by you.

We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

What is all our knowledge worth? We do not even know what the weather will be tomorrow.

You can change only what people know, not what they do.