Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Bertrand Russell

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Albert Einstein

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Cardinal Bellarmine
(during the trial of Galileo)

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its oponents and making them see the light, but rather because its oponents eventually die.

Niels Bohr

If we think we can picture what is going on in the quantum domain, that is one indication that we've got it wrong.

Erwin Schrödinger

Matter is not made of matter.

Hans-Peter Dürr

Scientists are in the strange position of being confronted daily by the indisputable fact of their own consciousness, yet with no way of explaining it.

Christian de Quincey

As to the ultimate nature of things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to equilibrium.

Carl Jung

There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein

Every man's world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind, and cannot be proved to have any other existance.

Erwin Schrödinger

The ultimate work of civilization is the unfolding of ever deeper spiritual understanding.

Arnold Toynbee

The aim isn't to degrade mind to matter, but to upgrade the properties of matter to account for mind, and to tell how from the dust and water of the earth, natural forces conjured a mental system capable of asking why it exists.

Nigel Calder

Our percieving self is nowhere to be found within the world-picture, because it is itself the world-picture.

Erwin Schrödinger

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

St. Augustine

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring tyrant of all that is.

Bertrand Russell

If men and women have come up from the beasts, then they will likely end up with the gods.

Ken Wilber

I am Brahman... I dwell within all beings as the soul, the pure consciousness, the ground of all phenomena... In the days of my ignorance, I used to think of these as beings separate from myself. Now I know that I am All.

Shankara

When I say "I am," I do not mean a separate entity with a body at its nucleus. I mean the totality of being, the ocean of consciousness, the entire universe of all that is and knows.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Quotes from The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda