Sort of underway by then He was sort of underway by then...he had this whole ritual for showing the work to people – you had to sit in a chair that was positioned what he felt was exactly the right distance from the painting. There was a certain mystique about it that worked for him. Craig Kauffman, Robert Irwin: A Conditional Art ritualmystery
Mystery exists in the mind Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies The Tao of rationality mysteryconfusion
The world of shadows The 'mysterious Orient' of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depth of an alcove to which the sunlight never penetrated. This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows darknessmystery
On Theft How do we know what’s the right direction [for computers to take]? Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasn’t been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them — we all brought to this effort — a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview A fresh focus of power