“Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.”
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
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Kevin Kelly 141
American author and editor 1952Related quotes
On the Museum of Modern Art, Newsweek (June 1, 1964).

“One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.”
Account of his famous dream of the benzene structure, as quoted in A Life of Magic Chemistry : Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner (2001) by George A. Olah, p. 54<!-- also partially quoted in Serendipity, Accidental Discoveries in Science (1989) by Royston M. Roberts , pp. 75-81 -->
Context: I was sitting writing on my textbook, but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation; long rows sometimes more closely fitted together all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Let us learn to dream, gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth... but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.

Leningrad, September 1945
The Kennan Diaries
p, 125
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

“959. Bees that have Honey in their Mouths, have Stings in their Tails.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)