“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

— John Muir

“The power of any orthodoxy resides in its ability to not seem like one”

— Michael Pollan

“When everything is connected to everything else, for better or worse, everything matters.”

— Bruce Mau

“A paradox is not a conflict within reality. It is a conflict between reality and your feeling of what reality ‘ought to be.’”

— Richard Feynman

“I call myself a tradesman, but any good tradesman should work only on problems that come within his genuine ineterst, and you solve a problem for your client where your two interests overlap. You should do an injustice both to yourself and your client to work on a problem of interest to the client but not to you — it just wouldn’t work. In that spirit, we are tradesmen. If your work is good enough it can be art, but art isn’t a product. It’s a quality.”

— Charles Eames

“Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender.”

— Bhagavad Gita

“I think of myself officially as an architect. I can’t help but look at the problems around us as problems of structure — and structure is architecture.”

— Charles Eames

“The space that symbolizes the Information Age is not the symmetrical and ornamental space of traditional architecture, the rectangular volumes of modernism, nor the broken and blown up volumes of deconstruction. Rather, it is space whose shapes are inherently mutable and whose soft contours act as a metaphor for the key quality of computer-driven representations and systems: variability.”

— Lev Manovich

“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.”

— Steven Johnson