Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

This connection of all created things with every single one of them and their adaptation to every single one, as well as the connection and adaptation of every single thing to all others, has the result that every single substance stands in relations which express all the others. Whence every single substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

So everything is something else.

I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - such a strange melange of good and evil.

"If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different kinds of atoms arranged in many ways, continually changing, not repeating, how much more marvelously is it possible that this thing might behave? Is it possible that that "thing" walking back and forth in front of you, talking to you, is a great glob of these atoms in a very complex arrangement, such that the sheer complexity of it staggers the imagination as to what it can do? When we say we are a pile of atoms, we do not mean we are merely a pile of atoms, because a pile of atoms which is not repeated from one to the other might well have the possibilities which you see before you in the mirror."

I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

THE QUESTION IS, OF COURSE, IS IT GOING TO BE POSSIBLE TO AMALGAMATE EVERYTHING,
AND MERELY DISCOVER THAT THIS WORLD REPRESENTS DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF ONE THING?

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment.