"The Pyramids of Chaos" -- Stanislaw Lem -- The Investigation

What if there isn't anything to imitate?  

What if the world isn't scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle-- 

what if it's like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, 

and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole?  

What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, 

things that have fronts or rears but not both, 

with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, 

until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, 

although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions. 

[...] 

The mathematical order of the universe is our answer to the pyramids of chaos.

--Lt. Gregory from The Investigation, 

by Stanislaw Lem

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More on Chaos...

[ Is Herzog Serious? ]

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"We are Clinging to a Great many Piano tops" -- Buckminster Fuller

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver.  But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top.  I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings as constituting the only means for solving a given problem.

--  R. Buckminster Fuller,  

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth 

"The Montreal Biosphere"
designed by Buckminster Fuller

(image via wikipedia )

"We live in a world of superlatives" -- Karel Capek

Superlatives (XXXVI)

One of the most popular form of words in both criticism and life is the superlative.  You're forever coming across 'the greatest Czech poet;' 'the most outstanding work of our time,' 'the best humorist' and suchlike, almost as you do in advertisements-- 'the best alcohol-free drink,' 'the best factory of its kinds,' 'the most this,' 'the best that,' again and again without end.  We live in a world of superlatives.  However, Alpha fizz or Omega pop may be the best alcohol-free drink, and still not be good.  The greatest poet of the Trebizond tsardom doesn't in effect have to be great, and the greatest humorist of our time doesn't have to be good at all-- quite simply, good is better than best, great is greater than greatest, and the positive is more serious, more absolute and weightier than the superlative.

If a woman wants to be the most beautiful in society, she's a vain coquette; if she wants to be simply beautiful, she accomplishes a classic, God-pleasing work.  If someone wants to write the greatest Czech novel, he commits a grubby piece of competitiveness against no fewer than 150 best Czech novels.  If, however, he wants to write a good novel, his ambition is great and honest.  When Leibniz tried to prove that our world is the best of all possible worlds, he justified God very unreliably; he'd have done better if he had provided (of course an impossible) proof that our world is good.  Nothing more than good.  Yes, of course, we have invented superlatives mainly in order to wriggle out of the difficult examination of whether things are good, great and beautiful.  We speak in superlatives not because we like to exaggerate, but because we don't have the courage to speak in positives.

-- Karel Capek, Believe in People

"Beauty by Mistake" -- Milan Kundera

Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, 

it will go on existing for a while by mistake.  

'Beauty by mistake'-- 

the final phase in the history of beauty.

-- Milan Kundera,

The Unbearable Lightness of Being