Top 70 Douglas R. Hofstadter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

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2. “For now, what is important is not finding the answer, but looking for it.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

3. “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order – and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

4. “The following sentence is false. The preceding sentence is true.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

5. “Irrationality is the square root of all evil.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

6. “This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

7. “I am the thought you are now thinking.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

8. “In fact, a sense of essence is, in essence, the essence of sense, in effect.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

9. “Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful cannot lead to all truths.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

10. “GEB is in essence a long proposal of strange loops as a metaphor for how selfhood originates, a metaphor by which to begin to grab a hold of just what it is that makes an “I” seem, at one and the same time, so terribly real and tangible to its own possessor, and yet also so vague, so impenetrable, so deeply elusive.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

11. “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

12. “Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

13. “The perception of an isomorphism between two known structures is a significant advance in knowledge-and I claim that it is such perceptions of isomorphism which create meanings in the minds of people.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

14. “You make decisions, take actions, affect the world, receive feedback from the world, incorporate it into yourself, then the updated ‘you’ makes more decisions, and so forth, ’round and ’round.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

15. “Below Every Tangled Hierarchy Lies An Inviolate Level.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

16. “It as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

17. “To paraphrase Descartes again: “I think; therefore I have no access to the level where I sum.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

18. “The nice thing about having a brain is that one can learn, that ignorance can be supplanted by knowledge, and that small bits of knowledge can gradually pile up into substantial heaps.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

19. “This sentence contradicts itself – no actually it doesn’t.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

20. “Reductionism is merciless.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

21. “It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done...”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

22. “The theorem can be likened to a pearl, and the method of proof to an oyster. The pearl is prized for its luster and simplicity; the oyster is a complex living beast whose innards give rise to this mysteriously simple gem.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

23. “Sometimes it seems as though each new step towards AI, rather than producing something which everyone agrees is real intelligence, merely reveals what real intelligence is not.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

24. “But finally I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to construct the central object, and came up with this book.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

25. “If a mosquito has a soul, it is mostly evil. So I don’t have too many qualms about putting a mosquito out of its misery. I’m a little more respectful of ants.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

26. “Consider the fact that you are now experiencing death, in a curious way. Not being in Paris right now, you know what it is like to be dead in Paris. No lights, no sounds – nothing. The same goes for Timbuctu. In fact, you are dead everywhere – except for one small spot. Just think how close you are to being dead everywhere!”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

27. “I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

28. “Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems – vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

29. “We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level. As survival-seeking beings, we are driven to seek efficient explanations that make reference only to entities at our own level. We therefore draw conceptual boundaries around entities that we easily perceive, and in so doing we carve out what seems to us to be reality.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

30. “We are all egocentric, and what is realest to each of us, in the end, is ourself.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

31. “Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

32. “You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people’s brains. It’s a less detailed copy, it’s coarse-grained.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

33. “I personally cannot imagine that consciousness will be fully understood without reference to Godelian loops or level-crossing feedback loops.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

34. “There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

35. “There can be conceptual skeletons on several different levels of abstraction. For instance, the “isomorphism” between Bongard problems 70 and 71, already pointed out, involves higher-level conceptual skeleton than that needed to solve either problem in isolation.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

36. “There are those who will immediately be drawn to the idea of pattern-seeking, and.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

37. “Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

38. “The strange flavour of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

39. “It is perhaps wrong to say that the enemy of enlightenment is logic; rather, it is dualistic, verbal thinking. In fact, it is even more basic than that: it is perception.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

40. “Enormous numbers of people are taken in, or at least beguiled and fascinated, by what seems to me to be unbelievable hocum, and relatively few are concerned with or thrilled by the astounding-yet true-facts of science, as put forth in the pages of, say, Scientific American.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

41. “No reference is truly direct – every reference depends on SOME kind of coding scheme. It’s just a question of how implicit it is.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

42. “It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

43. “And that is also the way the human mind works – by the compounding of old ideas into new structures that become new ideas that can themselves be used in compounds, and round and round endlessly, growing ever more remote from the basic earthbound imagery that is each language’s soil.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

44. “Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it’s much more than memory.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

45. “I don’t feel I have the right to snuff the lives of chicken and fish.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

46. “Some of us, perhaps all of us, believe that it is legitimate to kill enemy soldiers in a war, as if war were a special circumstance that shrinks the sizes of enemy souls.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

47. “It is curious, how one often mistrusts one’s own opinions if they are stated by someone else.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

48. “It now becomes clear that consistency is not a property of a formal system per se, but depends on the interpretation which is proposed for it. By the same token, inconsistency is not an intrinsic property of any formal system.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

49. “When a system of “meaningless” symbols has patterns in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning-indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is. Depending on how complex and subtle and reliable the tracking is, different degrees of meaningfulness arise.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter

50. “Seeing anything as waves suggests immediate knobs: wavelength, frequency, amplitude, speed, medium, and a host of other basic notions that define the essence of undularity. Seeing anything as particles suggests totally different knobs: mass, shape, radius, rotation, constituents, and a host of other basic notions that define the essence of corpuscularity.”

— Douglas R. Hofstadter