“Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream and the physical world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.”
As quoted in The World of Mathematics (1956) by J. R. Newman, p. 1832
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Gottfried Leibniz29
German mathematician and philosopher 1646–1716Related quotes
Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician
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“Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not.”
Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author
As quoted in Writers (1995) Published by A. Deutsch
1990s
Context: Nothing is as real as a dream. The world can change around you, but your dream will not. Your life may change, but your dream doesn't have to. Responsibilities need not erase it. Duties need not obscure it. Your spouse and children need not get in its way, because the dream is within you. No one can take your dream away.
“The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Source: 1840s, Works of Love (1847), p. 5
Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher
Socrates, p. 35
L'Âme et la danse (1921)
Vannevar Bush book As We May Think
As We May Think (1945)
Context: If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. The abacus, with its beads strung on parallel wires, led the Arabs to positional numeration and the concept of zero many centuries before the rest of the world; and it was a useful tool — so useful that it still exists.