Order doesn't come by itself..

The extraordinary fact is that the first idea I had which motivated me, that worked, is conjecture, a mathematical idea which may or may not be true.….

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity..

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minut….

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of ….

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregul….

It was a very big gamble. I lost my job in France, I received a job in which was extremely uncertain, how long would IBM be interested in research, b….

The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people..

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very….

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.

I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics..

The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, whi….

I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not - for the job th….

I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. Therefore, as I will tell, ….

When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one..

If you look at coastlines, if you look at that them from far away, from an airplane, well, you don't see details, you see a certain complication. Whe….

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 theoretical….

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 ….

If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers….

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself..

Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules, which are repeated without end..