Ben Orlin > Ben's Quotes

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#1

“It is a funny paradox of design: utility breeds beauty. There is elegance in efficiency, a visual pleasure in things that just barely work.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

tags: beauty, design, efficiency, elegance, funny, mathematics, paradox, pleasure, utility, visual

3 likes

#2

“Reality is a lovely starting point, but the coolest destinations lie far beyond it.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

tags: cool, destinations, lovely, mathematics-reality

4 likes

#3

“If you ditch the rulebook, you lose the grace. Even the wacky, avant-garde, convention-defying arts—experimental film, expressionist painting, professional wrestling—draw their power from playing against the limitations of the chosen medium.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

tags: constraints, creativity, grace, limitations, rules

1 likes

#4

“Creativity is what happens when a mind encounters an obstacle. It’s the human process of finding a way through, over, around, or beneath. No obstacle, no creativity.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

tags: constraints, creativity, mind, obstacle

4 likes

#5

“The secret to solving big problems, I learned, is knowing which little problems to ignore.”
― David Litt, Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years

28 likes

#6

“Real love is about fighting for something long after its flaws are laid bare. It’s about caring so deeply, you have no choice but to place another’s well-being above your own. Love is not a feeling. It transcends feelings. Love is what allows us to be disillusioned and to somehow still believe.”
― David Litt, Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years

12 likes

#7

“In the real world, speechwriters are more like personal trainers than puppet masters. They can help you present the most attractive version of yourself to the public. They can’t turn you into someone you’re not.”
― David Litt, Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years

8 likes

#8

“There are two kinds of people in life: those who like crude dualities and those who do not.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

tags: crude, dualities, humor, mathematics, people

1 likes

#9

“Science has never been defined by infallibility or superhuman perfection. It has always been about healthy skepticism, about putting every hypothesis to the test.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

tags: healthy, hypothesis, infallibility, perfection, science, skepticism, superhuman, test

1 likes

#10

“All the world's a differential equation, and the men and women are merely variables.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

tags: calculus, differential-equation, men, variables, women, world

2 likes

#11

“Mathematics can instruct us on how to optimize. But what to optimize—that remains a question for humans.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

tags: humans, instruct, mathematics, optimize, question

3 likes

#12

“History is the sum of the people living it.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

tags: history, integral, living, people, sum

1 likes

#13

“Paradox is the grain of sand that helps form the pearl of theory.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

tags: mathematics, paradox, theory

2 likes

#14

“Math is a weave of many threads: the formal and the intuitive, the simple and the profound, the momentary and the eternal. Love the thread you love. But never mistake it for the tapestry.”
― Ben Orlin, Change is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

tags: calculus, eternal, formal, intuitive, love, math, mistake, momentary, profound, simple

2 likes

#15

“Psychology: it's sociology for sociopaths.”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

tags: calculus, integrals, mathematics

1 likes

#16

“Hello! You are a Mission: Impossible agent. You dangle from ceilings into locked vaults, cling via suction cup to skyscrapers, and unmask your true identity to the double-crossers you’ve just triple-crossed. Also, you do not seem to get what “impossible” means. “Impossible” does not mean “as routine as a quarterly earnings report.” Nor does it mean “very rare” or “rather difficult” or “whew, it’s a good thing that knife blade halted a millimeter from Tom Cruise’s eye.” It means “not possible.” And yet it keeps happening. Your film’s title is as dishonest as its theme song is catchy.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

1 likes

#17

“With pendulums and escapements, we carved hours into minutes (the etymology: “a minute fraction of an hour”), and thence into seconds (as in “a second order” of tiny; a minute fraction of a minute).”
― Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World

1 likes

#18

“Much of our intellectual development is the story of how we learn to sort impressions: self or environment, rocks, trees, clouds, books, cats. It is a story of how we learn to judge and recognize colors, numbers, shapes, and abstract concepts. When we learn a new category, our internal model of the world rotates - often slightly, occasionally more.... Some shifts are emotional: holding a newborn in your hands and understanding just what a rich and varied life will come to this tiny seed of an individual, looking into the eyes of an animal and recognizing a kinship despite having traveled very different evolutionary paths. Some shifts are abstract: learning the crystalline pure beauty of a geometric proof's logic. Fractal geometry also represents a shift, both emotional and abstract...”
― Amelia Urry, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined

tags: cognitive-development, fractal-geometry, perspective, worldview

0 likes

#19

“Words are important, but not just as signifiers of ideas; they have their own rhythm, their own layering; pages sprinkled with hundreds of tiny mirrors, reflecting one another and bits of the world.”
― Amelia Urry, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined

tags: language, words, writing

0 likes

#20

“I found I missed the compelling riddle-like quality of especially tricky math problems, that tight flourish of logic unfolding step by step. This is probably the same quality that also attracts me to particularly tricky poems. In both cases, a sense of wonder animates the premise: how can these constructed symbols mean something true about the world?”
― Amelia Urry, Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined

tags: math-problems, poetry, symbols

0 likes

#21

“In reality, a river's basic shape... is not a line but a tree. A river is, in its essence, a thing that branches... Although it flows inward toward its trunk, in geological time it grew, and continues to grow, outward, like an organism, from its ocean outlet to its many headwaters. In the vernacular of a new science, it is fractal, its structure echoing itself on all scales, from river to stream to brook to creek to rivulet, branches too small to name and too many to count.”
― James Gleick, Nature's Chaos

tags: branching, chaos, fractals, rivers

3 likes

#22

“By my rambling digressions, I perceive myself to be grown old. I used to write more methodically, but one does not dress for private company as for a public ball. Perhaps 'tis only negligence.”
― Benjamin Franklin

5 likes

#23

“[M]y father discourag'd me by ridiculing my performances, and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars. So I escaped being a poet, most probably a very bad one.”
― Benjamin Franklin

tags: autobiography, bad-poetry, ben-franklin, poetry

3 likes

#24

“By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be grown old.”
― Benjamin Franklin

tags: aging, digressions

1 likes

#25

“I shake my head, horrified. "How can you say that? We've stayed free. We've struggled so hard to stay free."

She shrugs. "Maybe. Or maybe we've been captured by what you call freedom.”
― Greg Egan, Axiomatic

tags: free-will, freedom

0 likes

#26

“Psychological insurance can quickly turn predatory. When we buy protection against fear itself, we invite companies to make us afraid.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

1 likes

#27

“To do good work, you’ve first got to engage with nitty-gritty details. Then, to do great work, you’ve got to move beyond them.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

1 likes

#28

“The secret to our brilliance is that we never stop learning, and the secret to our learning is that we never stop playing.”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games―And Why They Matter

tags: brilliance, learning, playing, secret

2 likes

#29

“Why are mathematical games so universal? I truly don't know. But perhaps it's because the universe is so mathematical.”
― Ben Orlin, Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games―And Why They Matter

tags: games, mathematics, universal, universe

2 likes

#30

“An obsession is a pleasure that has attained the status of an idea.”
― Balzac

1 likes

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