50 quotes
The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves.
Mind and Matter (1958)
The laws of physics and chemistry are statistical throughout.
What Is Life? (1944)
The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.
Mind and Matter (1958)
I am born into an environment — I know not whence I came nor whither I go nor who I am.
Science and Humanism (1951)
Our burning question as to the whence and whither — all we can ourselves observe about it is the present environment.
Science and Humanism (1951)
If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology — we are quite unable to imagine the contrary...
Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Inconceiveable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence, this life of yours... is, in a certain sense, the whole.
Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.
Nature and the Greeks (1954)
We have just introduced the term gene for the hypothetical material carrier of a definite hereditary feature...
What Is Life? (1944)
I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives (or ψ-functions) have become entangled.
The multiplicity is only apparent. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not of the Upanishads only. The mystical experience of the union with God regularly leads to this view, unless strong prejudices stand in the way.
The Eye of Shiva: Eastern Mysticism and Science (1981)
Indeed in a certain sense two "I"s are identical namely when one disregards all special contents-their Karma. The goal of man is to preserve his karma and to develop it further when man dies his Karma lives and creates for itself another carrier.
Nature has no reverence towards life. Nature treats life as though it were the most valueless thing in the world.... Nature does not act by purposes.
Mind and Matter (1958)
We cannot, however, manage to make do with such old, familiar, and seemingly indispensable terms as "real" or "only possible"; we are never in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any concrete individual case.
Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.
The one all-highest Godhead
Subsisting in each being
And living when they perish—
Who this has seen, is seeing.
For he who has that highest God in all things found,
That man will of himself upon himself inflict no wound.
we never experiment with just one electron or atom or (small) molecule. In thought-experiments we sometimes assume that we do.
Are There Quantum Jumps? Part II (1952)
The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it...
Mind and Matter (1958)
I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.
Science and Humanism (1951)