Robert Smithson Quotes

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.

Nature can always be more complicated than we imagine.

By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one....

Change is not a linear process; it's an all-encompassing process, and it's alive in different ways.

Life is an evolution.

Your creatures can come into being only, like shoot from stem, as part of an endlessly renewed process of evolution.

Nature gropes and blunders and performs the crudest acts. There is no steady advance upward. There is no design.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended.

Chaos demands to be recognized and experienced before letting itself be converted into a new order.

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes.

The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force with the conclusion, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation or natural selection of those variations which are beneficial to the organism under the complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable degree the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal.

Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.

No story is a straight line. The geometry of a human life is too imperfect and complex, too distorted by the laughter of time and the bewildering intricacies of fate to admit the straight line into its system of laws.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

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.

Optimization hinders evolution.

We want to evolve; like the Stones.

We're supposed to keep evolving. Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?

Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Everything is born from change. ...there is nothing nature loves more that to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the one that make plants and children? Go deeper.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.