One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns, and that's what we love, and that's what we get off on.

"Some years ago, there was a lovely philosopher of science and journalist in Italy named Giulio Giorello, and he did an interview with me. And I don't know if he wrote it or not, but the headline in Corriere della Sera when it was published was "S?, abbiamo un'anima. Ma ? fatta di tanti piccoli robot ? "Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots." And I thought, exactly. That's the view. Yes, we have a soul, but in what sense? In the sense that our brains, unlike the brains even of dogs and cats and chimpanzees and dolphins, our brains have functional structures that give our brains powers that no other brains have - powers of look-ahead, primarily. We can understand our position in the world, we can see the future, we can understand where we came from. We know that we're here. No buffalo knows it's a buffalo, but we jolly well know that we're members of Homo sapiens, and it's the knowledge that we have and the can-do, our capacity to think ahead and to reflect and to evaluate and to evaluate our evaluations, and evaluate the grounds for our evaluations.

The content structures of our existence, whether of mind or body, are helpful in our daily activities. Nevertheless, these can also be very manipulative and restrictive concerning conscious awakening. Thoughts and emotions can be excellent students of life. However, they cannot and should never be the teacher or master of this mystery.

We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant. But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point, and after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance, so too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite--such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, such as in the jointed manikin or the God.

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations?. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures?. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.

Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.

Walking causes a repetitive, spontaneous poetry to rise naturally to the lips, words as simple as the sound of footsteps on the road. There also seems to be an echo of walking in the practice of two choruses singing a psalm in alternate verses, each on a single note, a practice that makes it possible to chant and listen by turns. Its main effect is one of repetition and alternation that St Ambrose compared to the sound of the sea: when a gentle surf is breaking quietly on the shore the regularity of the sound doesn't break the silence, but structures it and renders it audible. Psalmody in the same way, in the to-and-fro of alternating responses, produces (Ambrose said) a happy tranquillity in the soul. The echoing chants, the ebb and flow of waves recall the alternating movement of walking legs: not to shatter but to make the world's presence palpable and keep time with it. And just as Claudel said that sound renders silence accessible and useful, it ought to be said that walking renders presence accessible and useful.

As information technology restructures the work situation it abstracts thought from action.

Every company has two organizational structures: The formal one is written on the charts the other is the everyday relationship of the men and women in the organization.

Peace is a daily a weekly a monthly process gradually changing opinions slowly eroding old barriers quietly building new structures.

Usually when you see females in movies they feel like they have these metallic structures around them they are caged in by male energy.

The people and the mindset that killed 3 000 of our fellow citizens on September 11 2001 would have killed not 3 0 but 300 000 if they could have or 3 million or 30 million. We need to do everything we can within our value systems and legal structures to make sure that doesn't happen.

If you're going to vote on a television contract there is a certain rationality to saying that the same structures that are applied to Health Plan participation should be placed on the right to vote on a strike.

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data but we couldn't see any.

I have a lot of trouble understanding all the detail of finance and administration - but if you combine intellectual and professional capacity with a social conscience you can change things: countries structures economic models colonial states.

We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.

When I was in high school my friends and I would drive out into the country to abandoned houses and structures... haha... to ghost hunt. We would scare each other so bad! We would sometimes camp out by the abandoned buildings just to scare ourselves! Such good times. The adrenaline of real fear is so cool!

I used to love to draw. I didn't want to go to art class because I felt that would be too corny when I was young but architectural drafting was the cool thing to do because there was more precision. It taught me a lot about building and structures and doorways and frames and windowsills.

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren't usually interested in application because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It's structures and patterns and that's what we love and that's what we get off on.