Edward Tufte Quotes

I've split my life between a few different disciplines.

The only way I work as a designer is to consciously avoid specialisation.

One discipline always leads to another discipline.

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.

My work more than didn't fit in. It crossed willy-nilly the boundaries that people had spent their lives building up. It hits some 30 subfields of biology, even geology.

I don't look at a man who's expert in one area as a specialist. I look at him as a rookie in ten other areas.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn't been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

It makes sense that whatever the topic is, it's more compelling if you can provide the audience with a range of perspectives, and you can cross disciplines. And you don't have to control what people take out of it.

I think it enriches you as a scientist to be able to see things in an artistic perspective and as an artist to see things in a scientific perspective.

In an age of specialization people are proud to be able to do one thing well, but if that is all they know about, they are missing out on much else life has to offer.

The world is too complicated to have scientists only talking to scientists.

My mode as a writer is to layer different perspectives: the scientific, the philosophical, the political, the journalistic. When you layer them, you get a really wholesome, interesting picture.

Att our MIT lab, there are people from diverse backgrounds like architecture, psychology, and philosophy, giving a holistic touch to the creation of any technology we may have in mind.

When I came to MIT, there were four rubrics: science, art, design, and technology. And as you entered your degree, whether it was a master's or a Ph.D., if you were a citizen in one domain, you were a traveler in the other.

I have lots of different interests. Any of my friends will know I'm interested both in science and in art.

You have to go the rounds from individual to individual in order to gather the totality of the race.

Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline... We live with poets and politicians, preachers and philosophers. All have their ways of knowing, and all are valid in their proper domain. The world is too complex and interesting for one way to hold all the answers.

Where do new ideas come from? The answer is simple: differences. While there are many theories of creativity, the only tenet they all share is that creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures, and disciplines.

"Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.

The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.

Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences. ... In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

I'd shift disciplines, whether it was musical instruments or sports or whatever, and it's the same with that.

Knowledge is indivisible. When people grow wise in one direction, they are sure to make it easier for themselves to grow wise in other directions as well. On the other hand, when they split up knowledge, concentrate on their own field, and scorn and ignore other fields, they grow less wise - even in their own field.