128 Quotes by Mike Hockney

Their plastic smiles were so deeply ingrained it would probably take an elite demolition team to remove them.

The pleasure and pain parts of the brain are linked and anything that affects one also affects the other. The worst lows follow the best highs – isn’t that what people have always said? Apparently there was now scientific proof that it was true. A hugely pleasurable experience also triggers the pain circuits in the brain. Eventually when the pleasure has gone all that’s left is the pain.

Most people follow the path that everyone before them has trodden. That’s the quick way to avoid being a genius. The genius, and the fool and madman (!), always create brand new paths, upon which no other person has ever set foot. Nothing is more depressing than the “role model” if that means copying someone else. That’s how to kill off genius. The genius is he who has no precedent. He doesn’t copy anyone. He goes beyond everyone else to unknown and unexplored places.

They say that life isn’t measured by how many breaths we take, but by how many moments that take our breath away. Some people will pay any price for those breathless moments.

Every part of her felt the emptiness of life without John. She imagined she’d been skinned, and that ice-cold air was blowing over her flayed flesh. Staring at the white walls, she felt she was floating in some universe of her own, alone, damaged beyond repair, irredeemably cut off from love, from hope, from life itself.

The war of the ghosts and the machines is the war between mathematics and science. There can be only one winner – mathematics. Dimensionless mathematics is the noumenal ghost at the heart of the dimensional, phenomenal, scientific machine.

Humanity has dehumanised itself and now sees itself in purely machine terms … from which terrible consequences are flowing. Humanity progressively sees itself in machinelike terms in the belief that this would solve all of our problems, but, in fact, it has simply made them worse.

Mount Everest has a “death zone”. When a climber is in that zone, at very high altitude, he’s living on borrowed time. He will almost certainly need a good oxygen supply. All living tissue is starting to die (necrosis) thanks to the cold and the altitude. Unlike climbers, the higher that geniuses ascend, the more invigorated they become, the stronger their flesh and minds become. They experience the opposite of necrosis. They have entered the Life Zone.

Math is nothing – eternally structured, dynamic nothingness. Why does anything exist? Because it’s a special type of nothing – mathematical nothing. It needs nothing, expends nothing, and nothing can stop it, and that’s exactly why it can endure forever. There is only one perfect perpetual motion machine: mathematical nothingness, which is also everything.