Thus I've decided to take up some of these quotes and leave them in a post here on the blog.
Creativity
“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”
― Steve Jobs, Wired 1996
Ideas and Design
“You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90 per cent of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “Here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product... Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little different. And it’s that process that is the magic.”
― Steve Jobs, PBS, 1996
Consciousness
“If a vivid red rose comes into view, my experience of it is built up over a third of a second, as an initially brutal neuronal competition leads to the shaping of brain activity around my attention toward the rose. An ultrafast, harmonious neuronal rhythm spreads outward from the thalamus and merges my collective neural information of the rose, which is stored in specialist areas throughout my cortex. This high-frequency, long-range, unified mental chunk will also broadcast itself into the prefrontal parietal network, where the experience will come to life.
But if I were faced with a more novel or complex task, my consciousness would show its true potential. My prefrontal parietal network activity would reflect an engaged working memory, a focused attention, and a ravenous search for patterns in order to conquer whatever mental obstacle was in my way. Meanwhile, my specialist regions of cortex for example, areas that store knowledge about objects at the front of the temporal lobes - would take turns to support my consciousness by providing the specific contents to my experiences.”
― Daniel Bor, “The Ravenous Brain”, 2012
“Every art communicates because it expresses. It enables us to share vividly and deeply in meanings… For communication is not announcing things… Communication is the process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and singular… the conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who utters as well as to that of those who listen.”
― John Dewey, "Art as Experience", 1934
Storytelling
“The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasurable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1906
Writing Papers
“When you conclude a paper, you should always close a door and open a window.”
― Benjamin K. Bergen, "Louder Than Words", 2012
Life Value
“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
― J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher in the Rye", 1951