“… the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe.”

— Terry Pratchett , book The Last Continent

Source: The Last Continent

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Terry Pratchett 796

English author 1948–2015

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“The universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological.”

Ted Chiang book Stories of Your Life and Others

Story of Your Life; first appeared in Starlight 2, 1998.
Stories of Your Life and Others (2002)

“According to Dr. Ambedkar, Kapila is the source of one of Buddhism's most fundamental concepts, causality, and also of the related Buddhist rejection of the belief in a personal Creator of the universe: 'His next tenet related to causality-creation and its cause. Kapila denied the theory that there was a being who created the universe.”

Kapila Vedic sage, of the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy

Quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743, with quote from Ambedkar: The Buddha and his Dhamma, 1:5:2.

“The influence of modern physics goes beyond technology. It extends to the realm of thought and culture where it has led to a deep revision in man's conception of the universe and his relation to it.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), Ch. 1, Modern Physics, p. 17.

“Because the art of Africa was on rock shelters, not deep in caves, as in Europe, the ravages of time have eroded most of a rich expression. What we now see is the merest glimpse of what was on the minds of these people.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

“[A cave] that trembled with the roaring of the deep.”
Sonitu tremebunda profundi.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Source: Argonautica, Book IV, Line 180

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

“… the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“One must be prepared to reject not only the schema of the physical library, which is essentially a response to books and their proliferation, but the schema of the book itself, and even that of the printed page as a long term storage device, if one is to discover the kinds of procognitive systems needed in the future.”

J. C. R. Licklider Libraries of the future

As cited in: Ching-chih Chen (1980) Quantitative measurement and dynamic library service. p. 52.
Libraries of the future, 1965

“He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see — the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light — that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

"The Hero"
The Poems of Marianne Moore (2003)

“As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.”

Alan Moore book Watchmen

Source: Watchmen

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