“What is real? Is there more to reality than meets the eye? Yes! was Plato’s answer over two millennia ago. In his famous cave analogy, he likened us to people who’d lived their entire lives shackled in a cave, facing a blank wall, watching the shadows cast by things passing behind them, and eventually coming to mistakenly believe that these shadows were the full reality. Plato argued that what we humans call our everyday reality is similarly just a limited and distorted representation of the true reality, and that we must free ourselves from our mental shackles to begin comprehending it.”

— Max Tegmark , book Our Mathematical Universe

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)

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Max Tegmark 24

Swedish-American cosmologist 1967

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Source: Flowers for Algernon

“The sick reality about our over dependance on language is that trying to live without it is like a blind and deaf man with no arms or legs trying to navigate a dark narrow cave, and the cave is full of tarantulas.”

David Lynch (1946) American filmmaker, television director, visual artist, musician and occasional actor

About the human dependency on language to communicate, as quoted in The Washington Post (18 June 2011)

“You can think of the curriculum as the shadows cast on a wall by the light of education itself as it shines over, under, around, and through the myriad phases of our experience. It is a mistake to be sure to take these shadows for the reality, but they are something that helps us find or grasp or intuit that reality. The false notions that there is a fixed curriculum, that there is a list of things that an educated person ought to know, and that the shadow-exercises on the wall themselves are the content of education—these false notions all come from taking too seriously what was originally a wise recognition—the recognition that the shadows do in fact provide a starting point in our attempt to fully envision reality.”

Andrew Abbott (1948) American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.

Abott (2002) “Welcome to the University of Chicago http://www.ditext.com/abbott/abbott_aims.html Aims of Education Address. 2002

“Puppets really are the origin of theater. Even the shadow on the wall of Plato's cave was a puppet. The very first actor was some kind of hand creating some kind of animal.”

Julie Taymor (1952) American film and theatre director

Academy of Achievement interview (2006)
Context: You know, we still hear the word "puppet" and we get this nauseating image of some kind of Muppet or something. Puppets really are the origin of theater. Even the shadow on the wall of Plato's cave was a puppet. The very first actor was some kind of hand creating some kind of animal.