Maya

“That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status.”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”
― Pierre Simon de Laplace

“Stjecanje kontrole nad ženskim razmišljanjem ima, naime, svoja strogo određena pravila; onaj tko odluči ženu nagovarati, uvjeravati je razumnim argumentima i slično teško da će nešto postići. Kudikamo je pametnije odrediti osnovnu autostilizaciju žene (osnovne principe kojima se rukovodi, ideale, uvjerenja) i nastojati da se (pomoću sofizma, alogične demagogije itd.) željena odluka žene dovede u sklad s tom autostilizacijom.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
― Weber Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism