21 quotes
Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky.
The Act of Creation (1964)
Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations.
The more original a discovery the more obvious it seems afterwards.
The Act of Creation (1964)
Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955-1967 (1967)
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which — miraculously, it seems — merge into a significant event.
A puppet of the Gods is a tragic figure, a puppet suspended on his chromosomes is merely grotesque.
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)
Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.
The Act of Creation (1964)
God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.
The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories which once seemed to possess eternal life.
The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
In old days, temptation was of carnal nature. Now it takes the form of pure reason...Satan...is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic.
Chemically induced hallucinations, delusions and raptures may be frightening or wonderfully gratifying; in either case they are in the nature of confidence tricks played on one's own nervous system.
Return Trip to Nirvana from The Sunday Telegraph (1967)
If conquerors be regarded as the engine-drivers of History, then the conquerors of thought are perhaps the pointsmen who, less conspicuous to the traveller's eye, determine the direction of the journey.
The Sleepwalkeers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)
The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.
The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
Without the hard little bits of marble which are called 'facts' or 'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them.
The Act of Creation (1964)
We find in the history of ideas mutations which do not seem to correspond to any obvious need, and at first sight appear as mere playful whimsies — such as Apollonius' work on conic sections, or the non-Euclidean geometries, whose practical value became apparent only later.
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe (1959)
Indeed, the ideal for a well-functioning democratic state is like the ideal for a gentleman's well-cut suit — it is not noticed. For the common people of Britain, Gestapo and concentration camps have approximately the same degree of reality as the monster of Loch Ness. Atrocity propaganda is helpless against this healthy lack of imagination.
If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built-in mental disorder which drives him towards self-destruction.
The Ghost in the Machine (1967)
Long before Aldous Huxley found Yoga a remedy for our Brave New World, Schopenhauer called the Upanishads the consolation of his life.
Attributed
The greatest influence during the dark ages was Augustine, who was influenced by Plotinus, who was influenced by Indian mysticism.
Attributed
The Mahatma was the greatest living anachronism of the twentieth century... [India would probably be] better off today and healthier in mind without the Gandhian heritage.
Attributed