History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
— Shakespeare (Prospero)
The very worst metaphysics is that practiced by those who believe that they don't have any—that they have cleansed themselves of its outmoded and corrupting presence ... to adopt the null posture is very much to take a position.
— Stephen Harrison
Science is nothing more than the refinement of everyday thinking.
—Albert Einstein
The understanding, like the eye, while it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself, and it requires art and pains to set it at a distance and make it its own object.
—John Locke
A human being is part of the whole, called by us the "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
—Albert Einstein
Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. It is the faith that it is the privilige of man to learn to understand, that is his mission.
—Vannevar Bush
All that you see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.
—Edgar Allen Poe
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their entrances and exits; And one man in his time has many parts.
—William Shakespeare
[Man] does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination.
—George Gurdjieff, Russian mystic, author
If anything is poisoning our lives and weakening our society, it is reality—and not the fabrication of television writers and producers.
—Martin Maloney
All that is not thought is pure nothingness; since we can think only thoughts, and all the words we use to speak of things can express only thoughts, to say there is something other than thought is therefore an affirmation which can have no meaning.
—Henri Poincaré
When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.
—Bertrand Russell
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
—Anais Nim
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Insofar as mathematics is true, it does not describe the real world. Insofar as it describes the real world, it is not true.
—Albert Einstein
Every stone is light, slowed down and tied in a knot; and light is every stone's dream.
—Robert Alexander
There is no person 'in us' that perceives, separate from what is perceived, but the perceived is the perceiver.
—J. Krishnamurti: The Thinker Is the Thought
Nothing troubles me more than time and space; and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.
—Charles Lamb
You can't cross a chasm in two small steps
—David Lloyd George
The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.
—Socrates
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
—Confucius
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings
—William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice
A stone is frozen music
—Pythagoras
Architecture is frozen music
—Goethe
The most preposterous notion that Homo Sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, shaper and ruler of all universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
—Robert A. Heinlein
The basic texture of research consists of dreams into which the threads of reasoning, measurement, and calculation are woven.
—Scent-Györgyi, 1960
To those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophesy: What everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow.
—Dix, 1968
When facts come in the door, vitalism flies out the window.
—Crick 1966
Physics envy has long been the curse of biology
—Burian 1988
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
—John Stuart Mill
Scientists all have physics envy. At whatever level of science you are working, the level just beneath you seems a little more scientific. Biologists kind of envy biochemists, who kind of envy chemists, who kind of envy physicists. Everybody wants to wear a slightly whiter coat.
—David Weich
Chaos is the law of nature. Order is the dream of man.
—Anon
Music is the pleasure that the human soul encounters from counting without knowing that it is counting.
—Leibnitz
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable
—T. S. Elliot
For the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.
—D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form
The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.
—Avicenna (Ibn Saud)
Atheists are like wild feral dogs wih no master. But Christians are like loving
dogs with a giving and loving master. Domesticated dogs will love you always,
but Feral wild dogs HAVE to be put down. they are a danger to us all.
—Roger Bacon (On Atheism)
Galileo’s Manifesto for Science
“To be placed on the title-page of my collected works:
“Here it will be perceived from innumerable examples what is the use of mathematics for judgment in the natural sciences, and how impossible it is to philosophize correctly without it . . .
“Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes –– I mean the universe –– but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and characters in which it is written. This language is mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.”