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To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

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It’s as if you’d woken in a locked cell and found in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence in a language you don’t know. And you’d be sure this sentence was the key to your life. Also to this cell. And you’d spend years trying to decipher the sentence, until finally you’d understand it. But after a while you’d realize you got it wrong, and the sentence meant something else entirely. And so you’d have two sentences. Then three, and four, and ten, until you’d created a new language. And in that language you’d write the novel of your life. And once you’d reached old age you’d notice the door of the cell was open. You’d go out into the world. You’d walk the length and breadth of it, until in the shade of a massive tree you’d yearn for that one single sentence in a language you don’t know.

Sentence by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

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The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. Brown spat into the fire. That’s some more of your craziness, he said.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

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Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

Past Perfect by Vladimir Nabokov

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— Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger

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While Trippe pursued his lofty ambitions overseas, the mail contractors operating inside the United States absorbed themselves in the more worldly concern of making a buck. The Post Office paid the airlines by the ounce but charged the customer by the envelope. Thus Eastern Air Lines found it profitable to stuff envelopes with wet blotters and send them by airmail; the shipping fees from the Post Office exceeded the cost of buying the stamps. Similarly did Varney Speed Lines (later Continental Airlines) introduce a line of Christmas cards weighing a full ounce in its principal hub city of Boise. Other airlines began conducting internal correspondence by registered airmail, as regulations required the Post Office to secure even a single registered letter in a sack with a 16-ounce lock.

Hard Landing by Thomas Petzinger

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Too much time is wasted because of the assumption that methods already in existence will solve problems for which they were not designed; too many hypotheses and systems of thought in philosophy and elsewhere are based on the bizarre view that we, at this point in history, are in possession of the basic forms of understanding needed to comprehend absolutely anything.

The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel

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Consider, for instance, such words as “backlog,” “burnout,” “micromanaging,” and “underachiever,” all of which are commonplace in today’s America. I chose these particular words because I suspect that what they designate can be found not only here and now, but as well in distant cultures and epochs, quite in contrast to such culturally and temporally bound terms as “soap opera,” “mini-series,” “couch potato,” “news anchor,” “hit-and-run driver,” and so forth, which owe their existence to recent technological developments. So consider the first set of words. We Americans living at the millennium’s cusp perceive backlogs of all sorts permeating our lives — but we do so because the word is there, warmly inviting us to see them. But back in, say, Johann Sebastian Bach’s day, were there backlogs — or more precisely, were backlogs perceived? For that matter, did Bach ever experience burnout? Well, most likely he did — but did he know that he did? Or did some of his Latin pupils strike him as being underachievers? Could he see this quality without being given the label? Or, moving further afield, do Australian aborigines resent it when their relatives micromanage their lives? Of course, I could have chosen hundreds of other terms that have arisen only recently in our century, yet that designate aspects of life that were always around to be perceived but, for one reason or another, aroused little interest, and hence were neglected or overlooked.

Analogy as the Core of Cognition by Douglas Hofstadter

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The inductivist or Lamarckian approach operates with the idea of instruction from without, or from the environment. But the critical or Darwinian approach only allows instruction from within — from within the structure itself ... I contend that there is no such thing as instruction from without the structure. We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment. We use, rather, the method of trial and the elimination of error. As Ernst Gombrich says, ‘making comes before matching’: the active production of a new trial structure comes before its exposure to eliminating tests.

The Myth of the Framework by Karl Popper, from the Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

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Back at the orphanage, a day earlier, one of the kids, Ruslan, had asked me a riddle. There’s a donkey, he said, trapped on an island in the middle of the ocean. A volcano is erupting on the island and rivers of hot lava are flowing toward the donkey. In addition, all around the small island is a ring of fire. What, Ruslan wanted to know, would you do? I thought about it, came up blank, and said I didn’t know. And Ruslan, with a smile, said: the donkey didn’t know either.

Orphans by Charles D'Ambrosio

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The issue is not that the underlying rules are wrong so much as that they are irrelevant – rendered impotent by principles of organization.

A Different Universe by Robert B. Laughlin