“I don’t seek power and do not run around”

I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn’t expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

One couldn’t even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn’t expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.

It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

I didn’t feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and the colors around it and what it will really look like. It’s only a guess at the beginning, and then I try to refine it.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

The lapse of ages changes all things – time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Be careful of love. It’ll twist your brain around and leave you thinking up is down and right is wrong.

Around 20. I’d been trying to transition from the streets to the music business, but I would make demos and then quit for six months. And I started to realize that I couldn’t be successful until I let the street life go.

I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn’t just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen…It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

You’re a liar!” he turned around, his black eyes snapping. “i’m also a thief, a gambler, a cheat, and a murdered. But this happens to be one of the rare times when i’m telling the truth. Go home. Consider yourself lucky. You’ve got a chance to start fresh. Not everyone can say the same.