Quotes from David Gelernter

Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac.

A logical argument and a story are two ways of putting fragments in proper relationship and guessing where the whole sequence leads and how it gets there. This is the logic-versus-narrative axis. Spectrum Law: The mind is in business to make sense. Up-spectrum, it makes sense by making logic. Down-spectrum, it makes sense by creating stories.

If this is the Information Age, what are we so informed about?

those who care about literature and mind must know the Hebrew Bible, Donne, Sterne and Jane Austen, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Proust and Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and (of course) Shakespeare, to start.

superb group of mind-mindful novelists at work today: Philip Roth and Martin Amis, Cynthia Ozick, Jenny Erpenbeck, John Banville, V. S. Naipaul, and J. M. Coetzee—to start.

The future will be dense with computers. They will hang around everywhere in lush growths, like Spanish moss. They will swarm like locusts. But a swarm is not merely a big crowd: Individuals in the swarm lose their identities; the computers that make up this global swarm will blend together into the seamless substance of the cyberspere.

The stronger your grasp of every second of your life, including the paradoxical experience at the bottom of the spectrum, the stronger you are.

Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experience of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one's tongue. . . . All these have a distinct experienced quality. . . . To put it another way, we can say that a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel—an associated quality of experience.11

Experience is a body of memories we use (on purpose or implicitly) to guide us. But we don't experience an event merely by living through it. To experience an event, we must live through and remember it.

if we were forced to choose just one, there would be no way to deny that Judaism is the most important intellectual development in human history.

Good programmers know what's beautiful and bad ones don't.

There are great science books that were conceived as books. Feynman's famous introductory lectures in physics, which have a beginning and an end, which are written with style.

I would love to see writing taught online because at university like Yale, there are not enough teachers who are able to teach writing well, or in some cases, there are none.

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

At the same time, on the networks, there are thousands of groups that are building lifestreams, or lifestreaming for themselves in their own way. We'd love to see this activity.

Readable text and authority so that readers know how to spend - no matter how much information there is, I have the same number of minutes in my day, and I need to look to sources that I trust.

Surprise is the beginning of wisdom.

The best computer scientists are...technologists who crave beauty.

I think the universities as we know them will be dead in a future years. I'd like to see them replaced by something better, instead of something worse, and it's not clear which way it will go.