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For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.

— Vincent Van Gogh

Palau

But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need - if only we had eyes to see.

— Ed Abbey

Like an explosion awaiting a spark, unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there, for aeons on end, doing nothing at all or blindly generating evidence and storing it up or pouring it out into space. Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into a radically different type of physical activity: intense knowledge-creation, displaying all the various kinds of complexity, universality and reach that are inherent in the laws of nature, and transforming that environment from what is typical today into what could be typical tomorrow. If we want to, we could be that spark.

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

And while every organism is a factory for converting resources of a fixed type into more such organisms, human bodies (including their brains) are factories for transforming anything into anything the laws of nature allow. They are ‘universal constructors’.

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

Photography by Cole Thompson

(Source: zarembasinsanities)

But if man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and vulgar things. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)