When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.

Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.

The library will endure; it is the universe... We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and of the future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldnt necessarily be good.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.