Flux Quotes

“[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive

“What was scattered
gathers.
What was gathered
blows away.”
― Heraclitus

“Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“So do flux and reflux--the rhythm of change--alternate and persist in everything under the sky.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles

“Let us remember to
always rediscover one another
because we are
forever changing.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Familialism consists of magically denying social reality, and avoiding all connections with the actual flux.”
― Félix Guattari

“Such is life, imaginary or otherwise: a continuous parting of ways, a constant flux of approximation and distanciation, lines of fate intersecting at a point which is no-time, a theoretical crossroads fictitiously 'present,' an unstable ice floe forever drifting between was and will be.”
― Sol Luckman, Beginner's Luke

“Responsibility sucked rocks. Until a few months ago, I hadn’t been responsible for anything more than color-coordinating my wardrobe. But foil one vampire vixen bent on world domination and suddenly people expect all kinds of things. Some days it just didn’t pay to wake up dead. (teaser from ReVamped, coming September 1st)”
― Lucienne Diver

“Surely the Gods did not bring me safe through fire and sea only to kill me with a flux.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.”
― Henry Miller

“My vessel is launched on the boundless main and my sails are spread to the wind ! In the whole of the world there is nothing that stays unchanged. All is in flux. Any shape that is formed is constantly shifting.
Time itself flows steadily by in perpetual motion. Think of a river: no river can ever arrest its current, nor can the fleeting hour. But as water is forced downstream
by the water behind it and presses no less on the water ahead, so time is in constant flight and pursuit, continually new. The present turns into the past and the future replaces the present; every moment that passes is new and eternally changing.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“No man ever steps in the same river twice.” (Attributed to Heraclitus of Ephesus - an Ancient Greek philosopher)”
― Janet Skeslien Charles, The Paris Library

“When I arrive to a new place, it is no longer the place it was before my arrival. And I am not the same person either. I change it and it changes me on the spot. And together we give the world a slightly different face.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“Life is a dance more than it is an assertion and there is more health in dynamism or fluidity than there is rigidity and stasis.”
― Oli Anderson, Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

“Humans are the only race who are continuously either possessed by or obsessed for various energies!” ”
― Ramana Pemmaraju

“People would rather walk off the cliff than admit they're walking in the wrong direction.”
― Roman Kistler

“We say that a human being is a person and a distinctive, fixed self with a name and a life. He has an identity. But what is this self really made of, except from the basic elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus etc. and their subatomic particles? If a person is a specific, static, unchanged entity and existence, then what if an accident or a disease completely alters his body features? What if fear or madness changes his thoughts and perceptions? If dementia takes away his memories, or if drugs alter his emotions? And what if life circumstances, good or bad luck, modify his motives, his plans and his desires? Is it still the person we say he is? Or is selfhood a ghost, a useful fiction of the brain? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and perceptions? Flashes of hopes and desires? A bundle of alternating opinions and ideologies, of conflicting instincts and urges? If we take away all these from him, what would be left behind? If every drop of the ocean evaporates, is not the whole ocean gone? The immutable selfhood is a very old illusion and the last of illusions we ‘re going to abandon; if we ever will…”
― Giannis Delimitsos, A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms

“Most mathematics deals with static objects such as circles and triangles and numbers. But the great universe "out there," not made by us, is in a constant state of what Newton called flux. At every microsecond it changes magically into something different. Calculus is the mathematics of change.”
― Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy

“Everything fluctuates on earth; nothing remains in a constant and lasting form, and those affections which are attached to external things necessarily change with their object. We are ever looking forward or backward, ruminating on what is past, and can return no more, or anticipating the future, which may never arrive; there is nothing solid to which the heart can attach, itself, neither have we here below any pleasures that are lasting. Permanent, happiness is, I fear, unknown, and scarcely is there an instant in our most lively enjoyments when the heart can truly say, May this moment last forever!!! How then can such a fugitive state be called happiness, which leaves an uneasy void in the heart, which ever prompts us to regret something that is past, or desire something for the future?”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker

“The God-fearing, churchgoing farmers are all gone. Now they all have TVs on their roofs and orgies in their barns. The flux, Fly, man, the flux of time. If everything goes tits up, there’s always the farm and the cows...”
― Rawi Hage, Carnival

“Coffee, he insisted, has all but destroyed the plague in England. It preserves health in general and makes those who drink it hearty and fat; it helps the digestion and cures consumption and other maladies of the lung. It is wonderful for fluxes, even the bloody flux, and has been known to cure jaundice and every kind of inflammation. Besides all that, the Englishman wrote, it imparts astonishing powers of reason and concentration. In the years to come, the author said, the man who does not drink coffee may never hope to compete with the man who avails himself of its secrets.”
― David Liss, The Coffee Trader

“Metabolic networks remain the only class of biological network reconstructed reasonably comprehensively at the genome-scale in humans. Given that metabolic networks are ultimately based on directed chemical reactions that obey the laws of mass and energy balance, they can further serve the basis for calculations to predict reaction rates (metabolic flux). These fluxes can subsequently be used to compute productions and growth rates of metabolites. In flux balance analysis, the set of reactions is formulated as a stochiometric matrix, which enumerates the ratios of metabolite participation in each reaction. A set of physically possible reaction flux rates result by enforcing a steady-state mass balance (homeostasis) and additional constraints on reaction reversabilities and maximal conversion rates. From within the space of chemically feasible reaction flux combinations, the subset of biologically relevant reaction flux profiles can be solved by optimizing an objective function. The most commonly used objective function in microbes has been to maximize the production of biomass, which serves as a proxy for maximizing growth rate. Notably, while maximal growth may be an appropriate assumption for diseases such as cancer under certain conditions, the best cellular objective function to simulate many human tissues and cell types is unknown (and is likely condition-specific). Adjusting this objective function, which was developed based on microbial physiology, to better reflect human tissues is an area of active research.”
― Joseph Loscalzo, Network Medicine: Complex Systems in Human Disease and Therapeutics

“Everyone needs to be viewed and treated as a leader, because roles and responsibilities will always be in flux.”
― Richie Norton

“Most mathematics deals with static objects such as circles and triangles and numbers.
But the great universe "out there," not made by us, is in a constant state of what
Newton called flux. At every microsecond it changes magically into something different. Calculus is the mathematics of change.”
― Martin Gardner, Calculus Made Easy

“Everything is in flux, everything moves all the time. Nothing remains the same forever.”
― Ryan Gelpke, We Tragic Few

“Coincidence or a trick of fate (Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point this was what he believed), something that must hold some meaning, some larger truth, a sign of the terrible state of grace in which Padilla found himself, an emergency exit overlooked until now, or a message intended specifically for Amalfitano, a message perhaps signaling that he should have faith, that things that seemed to have come to a halt were still in motion, things that seemed like ruined statues were mending themselves and recovering.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman

“Sentenced to fade under the weight of external pressures—the eternal cycle of life at its most poignant. Whether we embrace it or not, there it stands—the somber truth that everything changes, and everything will one day succumb to decay and demise.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Days