Jay Matthews

“Most or all of what I do takes off from looking at the description of the world we have… like an art critic—saying, how could this have been better? And then trying to improve the equations …to explain things that don’t seem to fit,” he says. “Aesthetic guidance has been very crucial in trying to formulate new laws—and sometimes it’s worked.”

"the creator is an artist above all." yes, that’s what I think may be the most poetic way of stating this conclusion that the world, in large part, does embody beautiful ideas; that if you regard the world as a work of art — first of all, it helps you understand things, and secondly, it’s a pretty good work of art. It has tremendous beauty. It has... See more

 I look at it, certainly, inside relationships and how we reconcile these two fundamental needs that often spring from different sources and pull us in different directions. And I also think that love and desire belong, a little bit, to both of these sets of human needs, as well. So they relate, and they also conflict. And herein lies the mystery

... See more

"So it's taken some 4.6 billion years for a cosmic swirl of gas and dust to evolve into a planet fit for butterflies and children...This intricate web of life exists because Earth operates as a system in which everything is connected and interdependent. The word 'complex' does not begin to describe the workings of this system ."

How do we bear witness? How do we bid farewell?

"We’re seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And yet, having been with Rilke, his trust in life is still with me. And so I trust being with life, even though life — the web of life might crumble, but then I’m still with it. I’ll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling."

A vocation is a career that not only gives you fulfillment — meaning, flow, freedom — but that also has a definitive goal or a clear purpose to strive for attached to it, which drives your life and motivates you to get up in the morning.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling.

"Geography is central to the survival of humanity... we are now geographical leviathans. Our actions make things happen so extensively, quickly, and powerfully that we seem on the verge of rendering the very fabric of nature, social relations and meaning ."