If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!

The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.