60 Quotes by Douglas Hofstadter

We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.

The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.

The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.

You can never represent yourself totally .... to seek self -knowledge is to embark on a journey which ... will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described.

Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism . ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.

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

Irrationality is the square root of all evil

In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.

Reductionism is merciless.