Pickover's Quotes

#1. Pickover's lively, provocative travel guide takes readers into the fascinating realm of mystic math, from perfectly strange numbers to fractured geometries and other curious nooks and crannies of ancient worlds and modern times.

Ivars Peterson

#2. As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls

Clifford A. Pickover

#3. The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

Colum McCann

#4. Who else but the maestro of mathematical creativity, Clifford Pickover, to curate a museum of Strange Brains and write biographies of the scientific geniuses who formerly owned them? I'll never look at a pigeon, a pearl, or a Wheatstone bridge the same way again.

Mark Frauenfelder

#5. The psyche has been burned and left us senseless, the world has been darker than lights-out in a closet full of hungry bats, and the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on

Charles Bukowski

#6. I do not know if God is a mathematician, but mathematics is the loom upon which God weaves the fabric of the universe....The fact that reality can be described or approximated by simple mathematical expressions suggests to me that nature has mathematics at its core.

Clifford A. Pickover

#7. What I think is a really special movie is 'Black and White' with Kevin Costner and Octavia Spencer, which Mike Binder directed. I got to see a screening of it, and I think Kevin and Octavia and Anthony Mackie and Bill Burr all give such beautiful performances in that movie.

Gillian Jacobs

#8. Recorded music is more a marketing tool than a revenue source.

Irving Azoff

#9. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#10. Someone once said to me that success isn't everything and I think I know what they really meant. I believe what they really meant was that money wasn't everything and I certainly agree with that. But I do believe that success IS everything.

Jim Rohn

#11. There can never be a clock at the center of the Universe to which everyone can set their watches. Your entire life can be the blink of an eye to an alien who leaves Earth traveling close to the speed of light, then returns an hour later to find that you have been dead for centuries.

Clifford A. Pickover

#12. In taking stock of ourselves, we should not forget that fear plays a large part in the drama of failure. That is the first thing to be dropped. Fear is a mental deficiency susceptible of correction, if taken in hand before it gains an ascendency over us. Fear comes with the thought of failure.

Douglas Fairbanks

#13. Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.

Clifford A. Pickover

#14. She realized for the first time that two people can never reach each others deepest feelings and instincts, that they spend their lives side by side, linked it may be, but not mingled, and that each one's inmost being must go through life eternally alone.

Guy De Maupassant

#15. Without these supernova explosions, there are no mist-covered swamps, computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl. Without exploding stars, perhaps there could be a heaven, but there is certainly no Earth.

Clifford A. Pickover

#16. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has proved that if two black holes unite, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the surface areas of the initial black holes. For these reasons the total black-hole portion of the universe is ever increasing.

Clifford A. Pickover

#17. For those of you who are about to embark on reading The Math Book from cover to cover, look for the connections, gaze in awe at the evolution of ideas, and sail on the shoreless sea of imagination.

Clifford A. Pickover

#18. At his "World of Physics" Web site, Eric W. Weisstein notes that the fine structure constant continues to fascinate numerologists, who have claimed that connections exist between alpha, the Cheops pyramid, and Stonehenge!

Clifford A. Pickover

#19. Neutronium is so dense that a chunk the size of a thimble would weigh about 100 million tons.

Clifford A. Pickover

#20. God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that's all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God.

Catherynne M Valente

#21. True learning happens when books and friends, writing and understanding intermingle in a rich soup of participation.

R. David Lankes

#22. This three-dimensional froth even produces tunnels and wormlike tubes commonly depicted in embedding diagrams for quantum froth. The connecting bridges in the foam correspond to wormholes between different universes or between different places in the same universe.

Clifford A. Pickover

#23. Treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. - SETH GODIN

Jeff Goins

#24. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God.

T. S. Eliot

#25. Often, simply knowing the answer is the largest hurdle to overcome when formulating a proof.

Clifford A. Pickover

#26. The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.

Clifford A. Pickover

#27. Einstein created an unstoppable "intellectual chain reaction," an avalanche of pulsing, chattering neurons and memes that will ring for an eternity

Clifford A. Pickover

#28. Women can be wives and mothers but they can never be people.

Lara Cardella

#29. Our heirs, whatever or whoever they may be, will explore space and time to degrees we cannot currently fathom. They will create new melodies in the music of time. There are infinite harmonies to be explored.

Clifford A. Pickover

#30. You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?

Terry Pratchett

#31. Yoga is, as I can readily believe, the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity which is scarcely to be questioned. This unity creates a psychological disposition which makes possible intuitions that transcend consciousness.

Paramahansa Yogananda