R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

Everyone wants to be immortal. Few are. Margaret Thatcher is. Why? Because her values are timeless, eternal. Tap anyone on the shoulder anywhere in the world, and ask what Mrs Thatcher believed in, and they will tell you. They can give a clear answer to what she 'stood for.'

What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?

In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.

I'm pretty good at seeing like a lot of different things happening at once and putting them in a pattern and figuring out how you can rearrange it so it might have a better outcome.

A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.

I feel not only that I cannot disappear, as nothing disappears in the world, but that I will always be and have always been. I feel that, besides me, above me, spirits live, and that in this world there is truth.

Reality has no inside, outside, or middle part.

Don't simply dismiss a coincidence and let it drift away. Life is totally interconnected. These unusual 'things' are simply connections that surprise you because you aren't used to seeing life except in fragments. Now it is beginning to piece itself together.

You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very moment.

Ideas are intangible forces, but they have more power than the physical brains that give birth to them. They have the power to live on, after the brain that creates them has returned to dust.

That you carry yourself forward and experience the myriad things is delusion. That the myriad things come forward and experience themselves is awakening

The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind - creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers.

Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I - cared to look at.

There are a lot of very strong connections with music and mathematics. They both can work in patterns and sequences and repetitions.

Morality only is eternal. All the rest is balloon and bubble from the cradle to the grave.

In philosophy, the principles are more interesting than the examples. In literature, the examples are more interesting than the principles.

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.

A pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.

Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.

Nothing but truth is immortal.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discovered and established as Principles, and by them explaining the Phænomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations.

Once you become aware of your own body and its movements, you will be surprised that you are not your body. This is something of a basic principle, that if you can watch something then you are not it. You are the watcher, not the watched. You are the observer, not the observed. How can you be both?