Stephen Hawking quote: “We each exist for but a short time, and in that time explore but a small part of the whole universe”

“Think of the universal substance, of which thou has a very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it thou art”

Marcus Aurelius (121–180) Emperor of Ancient Rome

Source: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Letter of 1950, as quoted in The New York Times (29 March 1972) and The New York Post (28 November 1972). However, The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (Princeton University Press, 2005: , p. 206, has a different and presumably more accurate version of this letter, which she dates to February 12, 1950 and describes as "a letter to a distraught father who had lost his young son and had asked Einstein for some comforting words":<blockquote>A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.</blockquote> Letter transcript and photograph http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/11/delusion.html
Google Translate, with its improved neural machine translation system, gives a slightly different translation of the original German quote, as discussed by Bryce Haymond on his blog https://thymindoman.com/2018/03/29/einsteins-misquote-on-the-illusion-of-feeling-separate-from-the-whole/.<blockquote>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 is the only object of true religion. Not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it gives us the attainable measure of inner peace.</blockquote>
1950s
Context: A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "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. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

“We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole and self referential at all scales of its existence. We, and all things in the universe, are non-locally connected with each other and with all other things in ways that are unfettered by the hitherto known limitations of space and time.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Cosmos: A Co-creator's Guide to the Whole-World (2010), p. ix.

“Inside the united and indivisible universal Wholeness, every thought and action we make concerning the part, creates the reaction of the whole towards us. In short, whatever we are doing and in whichever way we are doing it, has a multiple effect on us, from every “corner” of the universal unity. The meaning of universal, indivisible unity creates a new social and ecological awareness, since the social and the nature are structural parts of the whole and every action we take against it, results in a reaction of the whole cosmic creation against us.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos

“Short of coming to their senses and abolishing the whole thing, we might expect that the rules for daylight saving time will remain the same for some time to come, but there is no guarantee.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

We can only be glad there is no daylight loan time, or we would face decades of too much daylight, only to be faced with a few years of total darkness to make up for it.
The Long, Painful History of Time http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html.

“There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.”

Clifford D. Simak book Ring Around the Sun

Ring Around the Sun (1954)
Context: There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.
And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past — except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.
Back on Man's original Earth, there had been speculation on travelling in time, of going back into yesterday or forward into tomorrow. And now he knew that you could not do it, that the same instant of time remained forever within each bracket, that Man's Earth had ridden the same bubble of the single instant from the time of its genesis and that it would die and come to nothing within that self-same instant.
You could travel in time, of course, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. But if you held a certain time sense you could break from one bracket to another, and when you did you would not find yesterday or tomorrow, but another world.