Initial Condition Quotes

Or in other words, it's the substance you've got when you start that determines the outcome.

How can we trace out the links between actions that people take today and really long-term outcomes for humanity - outcomes that stretch out indefinitely into the future? I call this effort macrostrategy - that is, to think about the really big strategic situation for having a positive impact on the long-term future. There's the butterfly effect: A small change in an initial condition could have arbitrarily large consequences.

If the fate of the universe was decided in a single moment at the instant of the Big Bang , that was the most creative moment of all.

The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?

A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time - the telling of what came first and before done forever.

You can only begin where you find yourself

There come nought out of the sacke but what was there.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

A lot depends on the starting point.

The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.

In the beginning was simplicity.

The other thing I've been discussing with friends is: when you're born do you start at a zero, or five?

A small change at the beginning of the design process defines an entirely different product at the end.