Islands in the Sea

"We are like islands in the sea,
separate on the surface
but connected in the deep."

- William James (1842 - 1910)

Bewilderments of the Eyes

"To them, I said, the truth
would be literally nothing but
the shadows of the images.
...

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he has a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den."

- Plato (c.424 - 348 BC)
Republic, "The Allegory of the Cave" 

Dimensionality of Time

"In this world, time has three dimensions, like space. Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real. At every point of decision, the world splits into three worlds, each with the same people, but different fates for those people. In time, there are an infinity of worlds."

- Alan Lightman (1948 - )
Einstein's Dreams

Illimitable Universe

"As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element... Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the 'riddles of the universe.'"

- Ernst Haeckel (1834 - 1919) 
The Riddle of the Universe

Limited Piece of the Whole

"A human being is a spatially and
temporally limited piece of the whole,
what we call the 'Universe.'
He experiences himself and his
feelings as separate from the rest,
an optical illusion of his consciousness.
The quest for liberation from this bondage
[or illusion] is the only object of true religion.
Not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming
it gives us the attainable measure of inner peace."

- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Google's translation of Einstein’s original quotation 

Fragmentation

"Another problem of fragmentation is that thought divides itself from feeling and from the body. Thought is said to be the mind; we have the notion that it is something abstract or spiritual or immaterial. Then there is the body, which is very physical. And we have emotions, which are perhaps somewhere in between. The idea is that they are all different. That is, we think of them as different. And we experience them as different because we think of them as different."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Thought as a System

Ambiguous Dream

"Time weighs down on you
like an old, ambiguous dream.
You keep on moving,
trying to sleep through it.
But even if you go to
the ends of the earth,
you won't be able to escape it.
Still, you have to go there-
 to the edge of the world.
There's something you can't
do unless you get there."

- Haruki Murakami (1949 - )
Kafka on the Shore 

Transcendent Logic

"Universe, therefore, is only a mythological expression. The thoughts suggested by this word are perfectly irregular, entirely independent. As soon as we leave the bounds of the moment, as soon as we try to increase and extend our presence outside of itself, we exhaust ourselves in our liberty. We are surrounded by all the disorder of our knowledge, of our faculties. We are besieged by what is remembered, what is possible, what is imaginable, calculable, all the combinations of our ideas in all degrees of probability, in every phase of precision. How can we form a concept of something that is opposed to nothing, rejects nothing, resembles nothing? If it resembled something, it would no longer be the whole. If it resembles nothing... And, if this totality is equivalent in power to one's mind, the mind has no hold over it. All the objections that rise against an active infinity, all the difficulties encountered when one attempts to draw order out of multiplicity, here assert themselves. No proposition can be advanced about this subject so disordered in its richness that all attributes apply to it. Just as the universe escapes intuition, in the same way it is transcendent to logic.

As for its origin—in the beginning was fable.
It will be there always."

- Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)
"On Poe's Eureka" in Selected Writings of Paul Valéry

Plenum Model of the Ground

"The proposal I am making here - that the I which lies behind or inside all matter is an underlying substance, or 'original substance' underlying all matter - partially reunites us, part of the way, not all the way, towards a world of spirit. It does not make a separation between spirit and matter. Rather it asserts and insists that matter is not a purely mechanical material, but rather a spirit-like, Self-like substance, a material grounded in I, hence a different kind of substance from the space-time of Descartes and Einstein which were both postulated in the mechanistic tradition.

...

The plenum model of the Ground - the idea that the I is actually real in the universe, not only in the mind - is harder to accept... In this view we see the same ground - but we now think of it as a great thing in the universe, far beyond ourselves, haunting, otherworldly, ultimate in its beauty and light. It is reached only when a great work breaks through it."

- Christopher Alexander (1936 - 2022)
The Nature of Order: Luminous Ground

The concept of a World

"The concept of a world in the [Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics] MWI is based on the layman’s conception of a world; however, several features are different. Obviously, the definition of the world as everything that exists does not hold in the MWI. 'Everything that exists' is the Universe, and there is only one Universe. The Universe incorporates many worlds similar to the one the layman is familiar with. A layman believes that our present world has a unique past and future. According to the MWI, a world defined at some moment of time corresponds to a unique world at a time in the past, but to a multitude of worlds at a time in the future."

- Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy