Douglas Hofstadter

"No reference is truly direct—every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is."

"The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling o…"

"Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

"The "Strange Loop" phenomenon occurs whenever, by moving upwards through levels of some hierarchial system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started."

"This type of paradox is quite characteristic of Zen. It is an attempt to "break the mind of logic."

"The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps."

"I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don't think Chopin was particu…"

"One of the basic tenets of Zen Buddhism is that there is no way to characterize what Zen is. No matter what verbal space you try to enclose Zen in, it resists, and spills over. It might seem, then, th…"