On Reality (Unsourced)

"A reality completely independent of the spirit that conceives it, sees it, or feels it, is an impossibility. A world so external as that, even if it existed, would be forever inaccessible to us." (Henri Poincaré)

"How can it be that mathematics, a product of human thought independent of experience, is so admirably adapted to the objects of reality." (Albert Einstein)

"Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net." (Vladimir Nabokov)

"In space-time, everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given in block, and the entire collection of events, successive for us, which form the existence of a material particle is represented by a line, the world-line of the particle. Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of spacetime which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them." (Louis de Broglie)

"Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality. [The] entire universe is made of matter, obviously. And matter is made of particles. It's made of electrons and neutrons and protons. So the entire universe is made out of particles. Now what are the particles made out of? They're not made out of anything. The only thing you can say about the reality of an electron is to cite its mathematical properties. So there's a sense in which matter has completely dissolved and what is left is just a mathematical structure." (Martin Gardner)

"On foundations we believe in the reality of mathematics, but of course, when philosophers attack us with their paradoxes, we rush to hide behind formalism and say 'mathematics is just a combination of meaningless symbols’ […]. Finally we are left in peace to go back to our mathematics and do it as we have always done, with the feeling each mathematician has that he is working with something real. The sensation is probably an illusion, but it is very convenient." (Jean Dieudonné)

"Space has devoured ether and time; it seems to be on the point of swallowing up also the field and the corpuscles, so that it alone remains as the vehicle of reality." (Albert Einstein)

"The human understanding is of its own nature prone to abstractions and gives us a substance and reality to thing which are fleeting. But to resolve nature into abstractions is less to our purpose than to dissect her into parts." (Francis Bacon)

"The scientific life of mathematicians can be pictured as an exploration of the geography of the 'mathematical reality' which they unveil gradually in their own private mental frame." (Alain Connes)

"There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality." (Werner Heisenberg)

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." (R Buckminster Fuller)