Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Another feature that everybody notices about the universe is that it's complex.

In little localized pockets, the universe is capable of building some beautiful complexity.

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth.

We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way. straying planets, These poems, people, lost ponies with Dragging saddles -- and rocky sure-foot trails. The worlds like an endless four-dimensional Game of Go. ants and pebbles In the thin loam, each rock a word a creek-washed stone Granite: ingrained with torment of fire and weight Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, As well as things.

Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order.

Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe.

I think my proper response is complete amazement and awe at the universe that we are in, and how it works is just far more complicated than humans will ever properly understand.

Jazz can accommodate so many things. Jazz is like the universe: it's been expanding since its creation, and it's connected to everything.

It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the universe. I am in overwhelming awe of it all: It is so fantastic, so complex, so beyond comprehension. What does it all mean -- if it has any meaning at all? But how can it all exist if it doesn't have some kind of meaning? I think anyone who suggests that they have the answer is motivated by the need to invent answers, because we have no such answers.

The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity.

The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

Chance never writ a legible book; chance never built a fair house; chance never drew a neat picture; it never did any of these things, nor ever will; nor can it be without absurdity supposed able to do them; which yet are works very gross and rude, very easy and feasible, as it were, in comparison to the production of a flower or a tree.

Nothing is impossible to us, except of course, that which is contrary to the laws of nature and the Universe.

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.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.

The Universe is either expressing a miracle or is pregnant with the next one.

Unity of plan everywhere lies hidden under the mask: of diversity of structure-the complex is everywhere evolved out of the simple.

There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.

Nothing is orderly till man takes hold of it. Everything in creation lies around loose.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

Is there anything in the universe more beautiful and protective than the simple complexity of a spider's web?

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order. The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.

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.

There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.

Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality...which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man?