“
Then you would hold me up, wouldn't you." He traced over her features with his fingertips. And as he did, for some strange reason, he felt the arms of infinity wrapping around them both, holding them close... linking them forever. Yes, he mouthed. I would hold you up. I will ever hold you up and hold you dear, lover mine.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #8))
“
8 is just an infinity symbol the right way up.
”
”
Kirsty Eagar (Raw Blue)
“
A figure 8 doesn’t figure into my plans to live to infinity.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (99 Cents For Some Nonsense)
“
He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities. I
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (Mirror Dance (Vorkosigan Saga, #8))
“
8’ is infinity, sat up.
”
”
David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue)
“
The Eighth doth demonstrate that the motion of the infinity of worlds [8] is not the result of external motive force, but of their own nature, and that despite this there existeth an infinite motor force.
The Ninth sheweth how infinite motion may be intensively verified in each of the worlds. To this we should add that since each moving body at the same time moveth itself and is moved, needs must that it may be seen in every point of the circle that it describeth around its own centre. And this objection we discharge on other occasions when it will be permissible to present the more diffuse doctrine.
”
”
Giordano Bruno (On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds: Five Cosmological Dialogues (Collected Works of Giordano Bruno Book 2))
“
All Sera could do was shake her head. "Please understand, Dak. The only reason the older me is walking so close to the older you is because there's not a whole lot else to choose from."
"Whatever you say," Dak told her. "Come here, let's hook our arms together and see if it's a good fit."
"Gross," Sera said. "I'd rather make out with my dog.
”
”
Matt de la Peña (Eternity (Infinity Ring, #8))
“
One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You’re doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You’re doing great, intellectuals! You’re doing great. Much
”
”
Andrew Klavan (The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ)
“
Having taken proper notice of the complexity of the machine [...] the infinity of ropes and cords, the sails, the varying forces that act upon them, and the skill required to manage the whole, directing the vessel in the desired direction [...] what pity it is that an art so important, so difficult, and so intimately concerned with the invariable laws of mechanical nature, should be so held by its possessors that it cannot improve but must die with each individual. Having no advantages of previous education, they cannot arrange their thoughts; they can scarcely be said to think. They can far less express or communicate to others the intuitive knowledge which they possess; and their art, acquired by habit alone, is little different from an instinct. We are as little entitled to expect improvement here as in the architecture of the bee or the beaver. The species cannot improve.
”
”
Patrick O'Brian (The Ionian Mission (Aubrey & Maturin, #8))
“
my reworking of that marvellous list. 1. Live as enjoyably as you can within financial reason. 2. If you have a bath, draw an inch or two of cold water and splash about in it. A cold shower will have the same uplifting effect. 3. Never stay up all night watching Netflix Originals about serial killers. 4. DON’T THINK TOO FAR
AHEAD. EVENING IS FINE,
BUT TOMORROW CAN
LOOK AFTER ITSELF. 5. Keep reasonably busy. 6. See as much as you can of the friends who like you, support you and make you laugh. See as little as you can of the friends who judge you, compare you to others and tire you (and don’t pretend you don’t know who they are). 7. Apply the same rules to casual acquaintances. If your instincts tell you they are toxic, walk away and don’t look back. 8. If you are low in the water, do not pretend that you aren’t. It makes it so much worse, and A STIFF UPPER LIP
ONLY GIVES YOU
A SORE JAW. 9. Good coffee and tea are a genuine help. 10. DO NOT
UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
OR FOR ANY REASON
AT ANY TIME
COMPARE YOURSELF
TO ANYONE ELSE. 11. Cultivate a gentle, healthy pessimism. It can result in more nice surprises. 12. Avoid drama about what is wrong with the world (unless it is funny), emotionally powerful music, other sad people, and anything likely to make you feel anxious or that you are not doing enough. 13. RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS ARE
HUMAN ANTIDEPRESSANTS. 14. Form a close bond with a local tree. 15. Make the room you most like sitting in as much of a comfy nest as you can. 16. Listen to David Attenborough. 17. STOP JUDGING YOURSELF.
STOP PUNISHING YOURSELF.
IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. 18. Keep warm. 19. Think as much as you can about space, infinity and the beyond. Anything that much bigger than you can be very relaxing. 20. Trust me.
”
”
Scarlett Curtis (It's Not OK to Feel Blue (and other lies): Inspirational people open up about their mental health)
“
One possibility is that many of these universes are unstable and decay to our familiar universe. We recall that the vacuum, instead of being a boring, featureless thing, is actually teeming with bubble universes popping in and out of existence, like in a bubble bath. Hawking called this the space-time foam. Most of these tiny bubble universes are unstable, jumping out of the vacuum and then jumping back in. In the same way, once the final formulation of the theory is found, one might be able to show that most of these alternate universes are unstable and decay down to our universe. For example, the natural time scale for these bubble universes is the Planck time, which is 10−43 seconds, an incredibly short amount of time. Most universes only live for this brief instant. Yet the age of our universe, by comparison, is 13.8 billion years, which is astronomically longer than the lifespan of most universes in this formulation. In other words, perhaps our universe is special among the infinity of universes in the landscape. Ours has outlasted them all, and that is why we are here today to discuss this question. But what do we do if the final equation turns out to be so complex that it cannot be solved by hand? Then it seems impossible to show that our universe is special among the universes in the landscape. At that point I think we should put it in a computer. This is the path taken for the quark theory. We recall that the Yang-Mills particle acts like a glue to bind quarks into a proton. But after fifty years, no one has been able to rigorously prove this mathematically. In fact, many physicists have pretty much given up hope of ever accomplishing it. Instead, the Yang-Mills equations are solved on a computer. This is done by approximating space-time as a series of lattice points. Normally, we think of space-time being a smooth surface, with an infinite number of points. When objects move, they pass through this infinite sequence. But we can approximate this smooth surface with a grid or lattice, like a mesh. As we let the spacing between lattice points get smaller and smaller, it becomes ordinary space-time, and the final theory begins to emerge. Similarly, once we have the final equation for M-theory, we can put it on a lattice and do the computation on a computer. In this scenario, our universe emerges from the output of a supercomputer. (However, I am reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when a gigantic supercomputer is built to find the meaning of life. After eons doing the calculation, the computer finally concluded that the meaning of the universe was “forty-two.”)
”
”
Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
“
Obvious fact: Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. ‘Us’ meaning laymen. It’s like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we ‘know,’ as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that astronomic singularities have infinite density, that our love for our children is evolutionarily preprogrammed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pâté. That we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We ‘know’ a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. So we abstract, compartmentalize: there’s stuff we know and stuff we ‘know’. I ‘know’ my love for my child is a function of natural selection, but I know I love him, and I feel and act on what I know. Viewed objectively, the whole thing is deeply schizoid; yet the fact of the matter is that as subjective laymen we don’t often feel the conflict. Because of course our lives are 99.9% concretely operational, and we operate concretely on what we know, not on what we ‘know’.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity)
“
I AM AN INDIAN,
LIKE OTHER BILLION,
HAPPY REPUBLIC DAY,
HOPE TO FIND A GOOD WAY,
WHERE THOUGHTS DIVINITY,
IS NOT IN INFINITY,
ITS UR LIBERTY.
”
”
Merlin Thomas
“
That's what happened to my parents' barn? A dinosaur stepped on it?
- Dak
”
”
Matt de la Peña (Eternity (Infinity Ring, #8))
“
Excuse me? Does anyoone know where I can find a Mr. and Mrs. Froste? They told me to meet them here this afternoon. Apparently they want to discuss a job. Something that could 'really make history'. Their words.
- Arin
”
”
Matt de la Peña (Eternity (Infinity Ring, #8))
“
2015 - the year of infinity - if you add all the numbers up you get 8 - which on it's side is the sign of infinity - and I think it's going to be one hell of a good year for us.
”
”
Jay Woodman
“
I took the luxury of watching the crows playing tag above our heads for a moment more, the graceful arc of their patterns intertwining in figure eights of infinity. That was probably our job here, to keep going and to do it with as much artistry and beauty as our hearts could bear.
”
”
Craig Johnson (As The Crow Flies (Walt Longmire, #8))
“
Endowed with the infinite attributes of Thought and Extension, Spinoza’s God is identical with the active, generative aspects of nature. In an infamous phrase that appeared in the Latin but not in the more accessible Dutch edition of the work, Spinoza refers to Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature.”8 “By God,” he says in one of the opening definitions of Part I, “I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” In other words, God is the universal, immanent system of causal principles or natures that gives Nature its ultimate unity.
”
”
Michael L. Morgan (The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge Companions to Religion))
“
But to take another example: there is such a thing as a phenomenon called the “color” red. Imagine how it might be defined. A reactionary would call it a “Bolshevik” (A1); a Bolshevik would say “My color” (A2); a color-blind person would say “such a thing does not exist” (A3); a Daltonist would say “that is green” (A4); a metaphysician would say “that is the soul of whiskey” (A5); an historian would say “that is the color of the ink with which human history has been written” (A6); an uneducated person would say “that is the color of blood” (A7); the modern scientist would say “it is the light of such and such wave length” (A8). If this last definition be “valid in infinity” or not we do not know, but it is, nevertheless, a “scientific truth” in the present condition of our knowledge.
”
”
Alfred Korzybski (Manhood of Humanity: Unlocking Human Potential: A Journey Through Language, Symbolism, and Time-Binding)
“
I stopped numbering my pages. Infinity seems to be a better number and my story is still unwritten. Besides, I do like its symbol a lot— a sleeping 8
”
”
Reena Doss (The Last Leaf Of Autumn: Barefoot and falling, infinity is a number that has none to end)
“
— The Individual, New Beginning 2 — Choice, Duality, Partnership 3 — Creativity, Collaboration, Community 4 — Structure, Stability, Foundation 5 — Change, Instability, Loss 6 — Balance, Choice, Harmony 7 — Inspired Action, Magic 8 — Infinity, Success, Power 9 — Alone, Near Completion 10 — Completion, End of a Cycle
”
”
Stefanie Caponi (Guided Tarot: A Beginner's Guide to Card Meanings, Spreads, and Intuitive Exercises for Seamless Readings)
“
How to live (forty pieces of advice I feel to be helpful but which I don’t always follow)
1. Appreciate happiness when it is there
2. Sip, don’t gulp.
3. Be gentle with yourself. Work less. Sleep more.
4. There is absolutely nothing in the past that you can change. That’s basic physics.
5. Beware of Tuesdays. And Octobers.
6. Kurt Vonnegut was right. “Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.”
7. Listen more than you talk.
8. Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.
9. Be aware that you are breathing.
10. Wherever you are, at any moment, try to find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
11. Hate is a pointless emotion to have inside you. It is like eating a scorpion to punish it for stinging you.
12. Go for a run. Then do some yoga.
13. Shower before noon.
14. Look at the sky. Remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity, in order to see the smallness of yourself.
15. Be kind.
16. Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
17. Do not watch TV aimlessly. Do not go on social media aimlessly. Always be aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. Don’t value TV less. Value it more. Then you will watch it less. Unchecked distractions will lead you to distraction.
18. Sit down. Lie down. Be still. Do nothing. Observe. Listen to your mind. Let it do what it does without judging it. Let it go, like Snow Queen in Frozen.
19. Don’t’ worry about things that probably won’t happen.
20. Look at trees. Be near trees. Plant trees. (Trees are great.)
21. Listen to that yoga instructor on YouTube, and “walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet”.
22. Live. Love. Let go. The three Ls.
23. Alcohol maths. Wine multiplies itself by itself. The more you have, the more you are likely to have. And if it is hard to stop at one glass, it will be impossible at three. Addition is multiplication.
24. Beware of the gap. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it. And you end up falling through.
25. Read a book without thinking about finishing it. Just read it. Enjoy every word, sentence, and paragraph. Don’t wish for it to end, or for it to never end.
26. No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.
27. Listen to what Hamlet – literature’s most famous depressive – told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
28. If someone loves you, let them. Believe in that love. Live for them, even when you feel there is no point.
29. You don’t need the world to understand you. It’s fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven’t experienced. Some will. Be grateful.
30. Jules Verne wrote of the “Living Infinite”. This is the world of love and emotion that is like a “sea”. If we can submerge ourselves in it, we find infinity in ourselves, and the space we need to survive.
31. Three in the morning is never the time to try and sort out your life.
32. Remember that there is nothing weird about you. You are just a human, and everything you do and feel is a natural thing, because we are natural animals. You are nature. You are a hominid ape. You are in the world and the world is in you. Everything connects.
33. Don’t believe in good or bad, or winning and losing, or victory and defeat, or ups and down. At your lowest and your highest, whether you are happy or despairing or calm or angry, there is a kernel of you that stays the same. That is the you that matters.
”
”
Matt Haig (Reasons to Stay Alive)
“
He was the kind of man who put the “ass” in passion.
”
”
Noel Chidwick (Shoreline of Infinity 8½: Edinburgh International Book Festival Special Edition)
“
yama—moral discipline comprising nonharming (ahimsā), nonstealing (asteya), truthfulness (satya), chastity (brahmacarya), and nongrasping or greedlessness (aparigraha) 2. niyama—self-restraint comprising purity (shauca), contentment (samtosha), asceticism (tapas), self-study (svādhyāya), and devotion to the Lord (īshvara-pranidhāna) 3. āsana—posture (specifically for meditation) 4. prānāyāma—breath control 5. pratyāhāra—sensory inhibition 6. dhāranā—concentration 7. dhyāna—meditation, or sustained and deepening concentration 8. samādhi—ecstasy, or merging in consciousness with the object of meditation Together the eight limbs lead practitioners out of the maze of their own preconceptions and confusions to a sublime state of freedom. This is accomplished through the progressive control of the mind (citta). Beyond the highest ecstatic state lies the freedom of the transcendental Self, which is the pure Witness (sākshin) of all mental processes. For Patanjali, Self-realization is kaivalya, or the “isolation” or “aloneness” of that transcendental Witness. The many free Selves (purusha) all intersect in infinity and eternity. Enlightenment, or liberation, consists in simply waking up to our true nature, which is the transcendental Spirit, or Self. HATHA-YOGA The word hatha means “force” or “forceful.” Thus Hatha-Yoga is the “forceful Yoga” or “Yoga of Force,” meaning the Yoga of the inner kundalinī power. This branch of Yoga, which is particularly associated with Matsyendra Nātha and Goraksha Nātha, two perfected masters or siddhas, is a medieval development arising out of Tantra. It approaches Self-realization through the vehicle of the physical body and its energetic (pranic/etheric) template. In the first instance, Hatha-Yoga seeks to strengthen or “bake” the body so that practitioners have a chance to cultivate higher realizations. Secondly, it means to transubstantiate the body into a “divine body” (divyadeha) or “adamantine body” (vajra-deha), which is endowed with all kinds of paranormal capacities. Thus, the disciplines of Hatha-Yoga are designed to help manifest the ultimate Reality in the finite human body-mind. Sri Aurobindo put it this way: The chief processes of Hathayoga are āsana and prānāyāma. By its numerous Asanas or fixed postures it first cures the body of that restlessness which is a sign of its inability to contain without working them off in action and movement the vital forces poured into it from the universal Life-Ocean, gives to it an extraordinary health, force and suppleness and seeks to liberate it from the habits by which it is subjected to ordinary physical Nature and kept within the narrow bounds of her normal operations. . . . By various subsidiary but elaborate processes the Hathayogin next contrives to keep the body free from all impurities and the nervous system unclogged for those exercises of respiration which are his most important instruments.1
”
”
Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
“
More important is that besides these four families, there are five “exceptional” Lie groups, named G2, F4, E6, E7, and the largest one, E8. And it can be proved that these are all the simple Lie groups there are, period. To appreciate how bizarre this is, imagine you visit a website where you can order door signs with numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on, all the way up to infinity. Then you can also order an emu, an empty bottle, and the Eiffel Tower. That’s how awkwardly the exceptional Lie groups sit beside the orderly infinite families.
”
”
Sabine Hossenfelder (Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray)
“
From a strictly realistic perspective, should we bet on infinite life and endless consequences to our actions? Pascal would argue that our answer must be a resounding „Yes!“ We might as well assume that there will be a future continuity of our personal consciousness, however changed, however disembodied or re-embodied, however connected or disconnected we remain to the „self“ we experience in this life. If we make that bet on our own future lives, then we will prepare in whatever way we can to assure that we continue in a good way, in a better embodiment and environment. We will become truly responsible for our thoughts and our acts. Even though we may not remember the previous-life self who made those preparations, we certainly will want to enjoy the results. If our bet is misplaced, and our preparations have no effect because we actually do enter oblivion at death, we will simply not exist to regret having made them.
But if we wrongly bet on noncontinuity and therefore do not prepare for the future and have to face it unprepared, then we may suffer seriously in our next existence, and we will very much regret our decision. Even if we don‘t remember making it, don‘t know why we are suffering, don‘t know how to fault ourselves for being so unconscious in our previous life, we will still suffer and regret. Pascal‘s wager is therefore a very safe bet – it has a clear-cut positive outcome. Whether our personal life is really terminal at death or in fact infinite in continuity, if we bet, like Pascal, on the existence of our life after death, in whatever form, we will be in the best possible position, however things turn out. (pp. 7-8, The Nature of Reality)
”
”
Robert A.F. Thurman (Infinite Life: Awakening to Bliss Within)
“
How many is a lot?” “More than a little, and less than infinity
”
”
Sam Sisavath (Daybreak (Road to Babylon #8))
“
For instance, if you keep taking on others’ feelings, inserting a 1 into your emotional boundary will help you put yourself first. Following are some of the meanings of the numbers 1 through 10, plus some powerful numbers above 10: 1:Initiates and begins; invokes the Creator; brings your needs to a conclusion and puts yourself first. 2:Represents pairing and duality; balances relationships; creates healthy liaisons; shares power. 3:Reflects optimism; the number of creation, it brings a beginning and an end together; ends chaos. 4:Signifies foundation and stability; provides grounding; achieves balance. 5:Promotes and progresses; creates a space for decision-making; provides the ability to go in any direction at will. 6:The number of service; indicates the presence of light and dark, good and evil, and the choices made between these. 7:Represents the divine principle; opens us for love and grace, erasing doubts about the divine path. 8:The symbol of power and infinity; establishes recurring patterns and illuminates karma; can be used to erase old and entrenched patterns or syndromes. 9:Represents change and harmony; eliminates the old and opens us to a new cycle; can erase evil. 10:Signifies building and starting over. The number of physical matter, it can create heaven on earth. 11:Represents inspiration; releases personal mythology; opens us to divine powers; erases self-esteem issues. 12:Signifies mastery over human drama; accesses own divine self, but still encompasses humanity; excellent for forgiveness. 22:For success in anything you do. 33:For teaching and accepting our own wisdom; invokes bravery and discipline.
”
”
Cyndi Dale (Energetic Boundaries: How to Stay Protected and Connected in Work, Love, and Life)
“
Here’s the painful irony: The big-picture economy, which is largely out of any president’s control, is the real source of this president’s political strength with voters who like him. The SSRN poll for CNN in June 2019 had a striking finding. Of those who approve of Trump, a plurality of 26 percent said they do so because of the economy, more than twice the next most-frequent answer. In the same economic issue basket, 8 percent cited jobs as a reason for liking him. On immigration, 4 percent said that’s the reason they like him. When it comes to other aspects of Trump’s persona, support falls to the single digits. Just 1 percent said they approve of him because he’s draining the proverbial D.C. swamp. A whopping 1 percent said they like him because he’s honest, which proves you can fool 1 percent of the people all the time. All of this is a sign of trouble ahead for Donald Trump, because his economic record is a rickety construction prone to collapse from external forces at any moment. A BUBBLE, READY TO POP The long, sweet climb in economic prosperity we’ve enjoyed for a decade comes down to the decisions of two men and one institution: George W. Bush in taking the vastly unpopular step of bailing out Wall Street in the 2009 economic crisis, and Barack Obama for flooding the economy with economic stimulus in his first term. The Federal Reserve enabled both of these decisions by issuing an ocean of low- or zero-interest credit for ten years. Sure, the bill will come due someday, but the party is still going. While Trump took short-term political advantage of it, every bubble gets pricked by the old invisible hand. In the current economic case, the blizzard of Trumpian bullshit will inevitably hit the fan. We’re awash in trillion-dollar deficits, the national debt is asymptotically approaching infinity, and we have a president who’s never hesitated to borrow and spend well beyond his means, or to simply throw up his hands and declare bankruptcy when it suits him. We never did—and most likely never will—tackle entitlement reform. Nations don’t get to go bankrupt; they collapse. The GOP passed a tax bill that is performing exactly as expected and predicted: A handful of hedge funds, America’s top corporations, and a few dozen billionaires were given a trillion-dollar-plus tax benefit. Even the tax cut’s most fervent proponents know that its effects were short-lived, the bill is coming due, and in 2022 or thereabouts it’s going to lead to annual deficits of close to $2 trillion.
”
”
Rick Wilson (Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves)