Photo source: Wikimedia Commons
This post is a collection of quotes about reality. There are 8 quotes divided into 3 sections. The painting above is by Hieronymous Bosch titled Adoration of Magi (1500).
A. Reality is the actual state of affairs (2)
B. Why is there something rather than nothing? (4)
C. Magic is the only explanation for reality existing (2)
A. Reality is the actual state of affairs
Anatol Rapoport (1911-2007, psychologist):
1. "A fundamental value in the scientific outlook is concerned with the best available map of reality." (Science and the Goals of Man, 1950)
Georg W. F. Hegel (1770-1831, philosopher)
2. "The enquiry into the essential destiny of Reason as far as it is considered in reference to the World is identical with the question, what is the ultimate design of the World?" (Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 1832)
B. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716, mathematician):
3. "Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?" (De Rerum Originatione Radicali, 1967)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951, philosopher):
4. "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922)
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976, philosopher):
5. "Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing? That is the question... And yet, we are each touched once, maybe even every now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us." (What is Metaphysics? 1929)
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018, physicist):
6. "The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" (1988, A Brief History of Time)
C. Magic is the only explanation for reality existing
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900, philosopher):
7. "Underneath this reality in which we live and have our being another different reality lies concealed..." (The Birth of Tragedy, 1872)
David Hume (1711-1776, philosopher):
8. "The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery." (The Natural History of Religion, 1757)
