"We ask 'Who am I? What am I? Where do I come from and where am I going?' The universe [...] wonders as we do, for we are the starry night itself, come to human form to ask these questions." ~ Stephan Martin
"The only things that can be known are those compatible with the existence of knowers." ~ George Greenstein (The Symbiotic Universe, p47)
"To educate is to guide students on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world." ~ Parker Palmer
“Poetry and science are allies, not opposites. Both are instruments of discovery, and together they make the two feet of one walking. We can only weigh the full meaning of facts by how we feel about them. Feelings are meaningful and useful to us because they emerge from the truths of this shifting, astonishing world. Observation and imagination, the microscope and the metaphor, the sense of amazement—you need all of them to take the measure of a moment, of a life. Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.”
~ Jane Hirschfield (Part of the “Poets for Science” exhibit at the March for Science demonstration on Earth Day, April 22, 2017)
"Reverence arises when faced with the incomprehensible. And by incomprehensible, I don't mean that something cannot be understood. I mean that whatever it is that we are attending to can be understood in many different ways. And yet, when all is said and done and we have come to the end of all our thoughts, no matter how brilliant, imaginative, and informed, all our logic no matter how grounded in reason, all our studies, there is a residue of feeling that goes beyond thought altogether, as when transported by some marvelous strains of music, or when struck by the artistry of a great painting. A feeling of awe arises that transcends mere explanation. The actuality - whatever it is - hovers in the mystery of its very phenomenological presence in relationship to our senses, including the non-conceptual, apprehending, knowing mind. I am speaking of the very existence of an event or object, its 'isness' as a phenomenon, its links with all other phenomena, all that has ever been, its numinous and luminous is-ness. In the case of a work of art, even the artist can't really articulate how it came about. We don't have words for such numinous and luminous feelings, and often forget how prevalent they are in our experience. We can easily become inured to them and cease noticing that we even have such feelings or are capable of having them, so caught up we can be in a certain way of knowing to the exclusion of others. We can lose the reverence even when it is incontrovertibly before us in every moment, as in nature, in animals and plants, in mountains and rivers, valleys and vistas, even as we carry great cause for such reverence in our very being, in our own nature, in our very bones, in our very cells, in our being alive. We are so caught up in our habits of limited awareness that we can miss even the blue sky or the fragrance of a rose, the thrilling of the lark or the wind on our skin... Having no words, we tend to fall back on the mechanical, which includes a lot of machine language, in an attempt to convince ourselves that we do understand."
~ John Kabat-Zinn
“To be complete we need to have a constant awareness of our cosmic bearings, where and when we fit into Nature’s patterns.” ~ Ianto Evans
"Properly presented, quantum mechanics is thoroughly in line with our deep human intuitions. It is the 300 years of indoctrination with basically false ideas about how nature works that now makes puzzling a process that is completely in line with normal human intuition." ~ Henry Stapp
"Pure mathematics consists entirely of such asseverations as that, if such and such a proposition is true of anything, then such and such another proposition is true of that thing. It is essential not to discuss whether the first proposition is really true, and not to mention what the anything is of which it is supposed to be true.... If your hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true."
~ Bertrand Russell
"The more important our tasks, and the more urgently we have to do them, the more critical it becomes to take the time to reflect on what we are doing." ~ Trileigh Tucker
[Buckminster Fuller decided to] "devote himself to asking, 'What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?' He decided he would just ask that question continuously & do what came to him, following his nose. In this way, working for humanity as an employee of the universe at large, you get to modify & contribute to your locale by who you are, how you are, & what you do. But it's no longer personal. It's just part of the totality of the universe expressing itself." ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Over the course of 14 billion years, hydrogen gas transformed itself into mountains, butterflies, the music of Bach, and you and me.” ~ Brian Swimme
"Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it." ~ Anais Nin
"There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.” ~ Alan Watts
"For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream, in the same simple way as I dream about the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots in the sky be any less accessible to us than the black dots on the map of France?" ~ Vincent van Gogh
"Look around you right now. Anything fabricated that you see represents a particular worldview realized into material form." ~ Stephan Martin
“Once in a while throughout the day…let go into full acceptance of the present moment, including how you are feeling and what you perceive to be happening… Give yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are. Then, when you’re ready, move in the direction your heart tells you to go, mindfully and with resolution.” ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn
"As a people, we now have the scientific ability to see so much more deeply into the universe than ancient people, yet we experience it so much less and connect with it almost not at all. This widespread cultural indifference to the universe is a staggering reality of our time -- and possibly our biggest mental handicap in solving global problems." ~ Joel Primack & Nancy Abrams
"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great [person] is [one] who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You are a moment of awareness within one thread of a vast & interwoven cosmic tapestry." ~ Todd Duncan
"Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi, or Zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or in the next, did not descend from Adam & Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body nor soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being." ~ Rumi
"For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the eyes and the ears." ~ Alan Watts
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
"This summer night deep down under the stars was all things you would ever see or hear or feel in your life, drowning you all at once." ~ Ray Bradbury
"[Wisdom is] the ability to actively embody alternative perspectives on a controversial or ambiguous situation, to conscientiously select the perspective to operate from, and to maintain the capacity to actively embody the alternative perspectives even after having selected." ~Jeremy Sherman
"The goals we pursue are always veiled. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us." ~ Milan Kundera
"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." ~ Goethe
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ~ Albert Einstein
"By surviving passages of doubt and depression on the vocational journey, I have become clear about at least one thing: self-care is never a selfish act -- it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give it the care it requires, we do so not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch." ~ Parker Palmer
"One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny." ~ Bertrand Russell
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
~ William Shakespeare (The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1)
"'Why is there anything rather than nothing?' is ... an expression of wonderment that there is a world in the first place, when there could presumably quite easily have been nothing. Perhaps this is part of what Ludwig Wittgenstein has in mind when he remarks that 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.' This, one might claim, is Wittgenstein's version of what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger calls the Seinsfrage, or question of Being. 'How come Being?' is the question to which Heidegger wants to return. He is less interested in how particular entities came about, than in the mind-bending fact that there are entities in the first place." ~ Terry Eagleton
"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries" ~ Carl Sagan
"In human affairs an idea is a greater moving force than any physical influence... So the shape of our future will depend to a large extent on our understanding of our role in the cosmic process." ~ Louise B. Young
“Each of us, when trying to establish values upon which to base conduct, is inevitably led to the question of one’s place in the greater whole. The linkage of this philosophical inquiry to the practical question of personal values is no mere intellectual abstraction. Martyrs in every age are vivid reminders of the fact that no influence upon human conduct...is stronger than beliefs about one’s relationship to the rest of the universe and to the power that shapes it. Such beliefs form the foundation of a person’s self-image, and hence, ultimately, of personal values....Science plays a key role in these matters. For what we value depends on what we believe, and what we believe is strongly influenced by science.”
~ Henry Stapp
"Either what we do every day matters, or nothing does. In a sense we live our entire lives in a day." ~ George Sheehan
"There are many windows through which we can look out into the world, searching for meaning. There are those opened up by science, their panes polished by a succession of brilliant, penetrating minds. Through these we can see ever further, ever more clearly, into areas that once lay beyond human knowledge. ... But there are other windows; windows that have been unshuttered by the logic of philosophers; windows through which the mystics seek their visions of the truth; windows from which the leaders of the great religions have peered as they searched for purpose not only in the wondrous beauty of the world, but also in its darkness and ugliness. Most of us, when we ponder on the mystery of our existence, peer through but one of these windows onto the world. And even that one is often misted over by the breath of our finite humanity. We clear a tiny peephole and stare through. No wonder we are confused by the tiny fraction of a whole that we see. it is, after all, like trying to comprehend the panorama of the desert or the sea through a rolled-up newspaper."
~ Jane Goodall
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas 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." (Attributed to Albert Einstein)