“Life is not a problem to be solved, nor a question to be answered. Life is a mystery to be experienced.”

— Alan Watts

“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

— Ecclesiastes according to Jean Baudrillard

“What is important is what cannot be said, the white space between the words.”

— Max Frisch

“The reality of the other person is not in what he reveals to you, but in what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen not to what he says but rather what he does not say.”

— Kahlil Gibran

“Information, defined intuitively and informally, might be something like ‘uncertainty’s antidote.’ This turns out also to be the formal definition — the amount of information comes from the amount by which something reduces uncertainty. (…)

The higher the [information] entropy, the more information there is. It turns out to be a value capable of measuring a startling array of things — from the flip of a coin to a telephone call, to a Joyce novel, to a first date, to last words, to a Turing test. (…)

Entropy suggests that we gain the most insight on a question when we take it to the friend, colleague, or mentor of whose reaction and response we’re least certain. And it suggests, perhaps, reversing the equation, that if we want to gain the most insight into a person, we should ask the question of whose answer we’re least certain. (…)

Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don’t quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can’t finish.”

— Brian Christian, “The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive”

“But mystics have never been very interested in theology. Mystics are interested in direct experience, and therefore — although you may laugh at them and say they are not scientific — they are empirical in their approach. And the Taoists, being mystics, were the only great group of ancient Chinese people who seriously studied nature. They were interested in its principles from the beginning, and their books are full of analogies between the Taoist way of life and the behaviour of natural forces seen in water, wind, or plants and rocks.”

— Alan Watts

“In Gordiano Bruno’s day the three terms were divided up differently, you had science and mysticism on one side, and religion on the other side. Science and mysticism are alike in their struggle against religion. They were both based on experience and respect for the individual. The idea of science and mysticism was go out and discover for yourself. Find out what works, find out how the universe is actually structured and how you relate to the structure of the universe. And so there were basically two areas of scientific exploration, the external and the internal. But they were both pursued by the same method, the experimental method.”

— Robert A. Wilson

“The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory.

Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

— Freeman Dyson, “How We Know” on James Gleick’s, book “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood”

“Science can be created only by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.

The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it. In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.

— Albert Einstein

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things that I don’t know anything about. But I don’t have to know an answer, I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell possible — it doesn’t frighten me.”

— Richard Feynman, “The Feynman Series - Beauty”