<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… but blessed is the one whom the Muses </em></p><p><em>love, for the voice of his mouth runs and is sweet, and even</em></p><p><em>when a man has sorrow fresh in the troublement of his spirit</em></p><p><em>and is struck to wonder over the grief in his heart, the singer,</em></p><p><em>the servant of the Muses singing the glories of ancient</em></p><p><em>men, and the blessed gods who have their homes on Olympos,</em></p><p><em>he no longer remembers sorrow, for the gifts of the goddesses</em></p><p><em>soon turn his thoughts elsewhere.</em></p>
Theogeny (lines 97-102), pp. 128-129
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood. So that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them … tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or one another except the shadows [of the “forms” which are behind them] cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them? … Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects. Consider, then, what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature something of this sort should happen to them: when one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and lift up his eyes to the light … And so, finally, I suppose, he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water or phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place. And at this point he would infer and conclude that this it is that provides the seasons … and is in some sort the cause of all these things they had seen. Well then, if he recalled to mind his first habitation and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow-bondsmen, do you not think that he would count himself happy in the change and pity them? He would indeed. </em></p>
Republic (7:514(A)-516(C), pp. 119-127), known in philosophy as Plato’s Parable of the Cave
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Now when it [the soul] is perfect and fully winged, it mounts upward and governs the whole world; but the soul which has lost its wings is borne along until it gets hold of something solid, when it settles down, taking upon itself an earthly body, which [only] seems to be self-moving, because of the power of the soul within it; and the whole compounded of the soul and body, is called a living thing, and is further designated as mortal … The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of the gods. But the divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and all such qualities; by these then the wings of the soul are nourished and grow, but by the opposite qualities, such as vileness and evil, they are wasted away and destroyed … For the colorless, formless, and intangible truly existing essence [God], with which all true knowledge is concerned, holds this [upper] region and is visible only to the mind, the pilot of the soul … and the intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving that which benefits it, rejoices in seeing reality for a space of time and by gazing upon truth [the beatific vision] is nourished and made happy …</em></p>
Phaedrus (246(c)-247(d))
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man; it always has been. </em></p>
attributed to, as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 106
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">That which always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, the same for all, the cosmos, neither made by god nor man, replenishes in measure as it burns away [like the sun?]. </em></p>
Fragments: the collected wisdom of Heraclitus (fragment 20)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[Archimedes’ treatises are,] without exception, monuments of mathematical exposition; the gradual revelation of the plan of attack, the masterly ordering of propositions, the stern elimination of everything not immediately relevant to the purpose, the finish of the whole, are so impressive in their perfection as to create a feeling akin to awe in the mind of the reader.</em></p>
quoted in Hirshfeld, Eureka Man: the life and legacy of Archimedes (3), p. 37
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">But upon His [God’s] individual works He has engraved unmistakable marks of His glory, so clear and so prominent that even unlettered and stupid folk cannot plead the excuse of ignorance … Wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of His glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and bountiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness … This skillful ordering of the universe is for us sort of a mirror in which we can contemplate God, who is otherwise invisible.</em></p>
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1:5:1), p. 52
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.</em></p>
quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton by David Brewster
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">No vision of God and heaven ever experienced by the most exalted prophet can, in my opinion, match the vision of the universe as seen by Newton or Einstein. </em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 17
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. </em></p>
Preface [to Androcles and the Lion] on the Prospects of Christianity (1915), in Complete Plays and Prefaces (volume 5), p. 413
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">… Christians throughout the centuries have continued to experience Jesus as a living spiritual reality, a figure of the present, not simply a memory from the past. These experiences (then and now) have taken a variety of forms such as visions and mystical experiences, and less dramatic forms such as a sense of the presence of Jesus — whether in prayer, worship, the Eucharist, in other people, or in the dailyness of our lives. The truth of Easter is grounded in these experiences, not in what happened (or didn’t happen) on a particular Sunday almost two thousand years ago. </em></p>
The Meaning of Jesus p. 135
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the City of God coming on the clouds of heaven. Thus the center of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to the future life … A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism; for civilization is only possible through the active cooperation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years.</em></p>
The Golden Bough, pp. 362-363
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis the end of religion … [A person] becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a “more” of the same quality. They [different religions] all agree that the “more” really exists; though some of them hold it to exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal structure of the world … The only thing that it [religious experience] unequivocally testifies to is that we can experience union with “something” larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. </em></p>
The Varieties of Religious Experience (20), pp. 507-510,525
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend [Romain Rolland] in his letters to me. I had sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered that he entirely agreed with my judgment upon religion, but that he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments. This, he says, consists of a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, “oceanic.” This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems … </em></p>
Civilization and its Discontents (volume 21:1), p. 64
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.</em></p>
A Common Faith (3)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A human being is a part of the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.</em></p>
letter dated February 12, 1950
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense [only] I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.</em></p>
“My Credo,” publicly spoken in German in 1932
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. This child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know how … The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. </em></p>
New York Times, April 25, 1929
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If one considers … only “dimensionless” constants [including the speed of light properly unitized] … that occur in the basic equations of physics … I would like to state a proposition that at present cannot be based upon anything more than a faith in simplicity, i.e., intelligibility, of nature: there are no </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">arbitrary</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> constants of this kind. That is to say, nature is so constituted that it is possible logically to lay down such strongly determined laws that within these laws only rationally, completely determined constants occur.</em></p>
Autobiographical Notes, p. 59
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike — yet it is the most precious thing we have.</em></p>
letter to Hans Muehsam, July 9, 1951
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">I see a pattern. But my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see the clock. But I cannot envisage the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions. How can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?</em></p>
“On Science,” in On Cosmic Religion
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Where is everybody?</em></p>
a version of the “Fermi paradox,” spoken in 1950 and quoted in Scientific American, July 2000
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There was nothing left of Earth … It has nourished them, through the fierce moments of their inconceivable metamorphosis, as the food stored in a grain of wheat feeds the infant plant while it climbs toward the Sun. </em></p>
Childhood’s End, p. 213
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The Cosmos [universe] extends, for all practical purposes, forever … Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the Solar System and beyond … will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot [earth] in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.</em></p>
Pale Blue Dot
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge. </em></p>
Pale Blue Dot, p. 77
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">One of science’s alleged crimes is revealing that our favorite, most reassuring stories about our place in the universe and how we came to be are delusional. Instead what science reveals is a universe much older and much vaster than the tidy, anthropomorphic proscenium of our ancestors. We have found from modern astronomy that we live on a tiny hunk of rock and metal third from the sun, that circles a humdrum star in the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, which contains some four hundred billion other stars, which is one of about a hundred billion other galaxies that make up the universe, and according to some current views, a universe that is one among an immense number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. In this perspective the idea that our planet is at the center of the universe, much less that human purpose is central to the existence of the universe, is pathetic. </em></p>
last public address given in the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, New York City
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us—a reason that demands its presence by the million amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself. </em></p>
The Edge of the Sea, p. 250
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">What an incredible thing these laws of physics are! Not only do they permit a universe to originate spontaneously; they encourage it to self-organize and self-complexify to the point where conscious beings emerge, and can look back on the great cosmic drama and reflect on what it means. </em></p>
“Physics and the Mind of God,” as quoted in Nancy Frankenberry, The Faith of Scientists, p. 419
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">If God is to be found, it must surely be through what we discover about the world, not what we fail to discover. </em></p>
God and the New Physics, as quoted in Nancy Frankenberry, The Faith of Scientists, p. 435
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">No one has been able to think of a logically consistent alternative to quantum mechanics that is only slightly different. Once you start trying to make small changes in quantum mechanics, you get into theories with negative probabilities or other logical absurdities. </em></p>
“A Designer Universe,” New York Review of Books 46, No. 16 (October 21, 1999), pp. 46-48, reprinted in Frankenberry, The Faith of Scientists (14), pp. 324-325
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold scientific world. I am left with only art, music, literature, theater, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love and the wonder of birth. That’ll do me.</em></p>
The Skeptics Guide to the Paranormal, p. viii
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">What makes for a beautiful problem in science? … It may be logical beauty: Proof that the set of prime numbers cannot be finite — since the product of any set of prime numbers plus one gives a new prime number — is as aesthetically neat in our times as it was in Euclid’s. But a problem takes on extra luster if, in addition to its logical elegance, it provides useful knowledge. The shortest distance between two points on a sphere is the arc of the great circle is an agreeable curiosity; that ships on earth actually follow such paths enhances its interest.</em></p>
“What Makes for a Beautiful Problem in Science,” Journal of Political Economy 78, No. 6, p. 1372 (December, 1970)
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">There is no absolute up or down … no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. </em></p>
Cause, Principle and Unity, 1584
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science … </em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">everything</em><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;"> can be created from nothing … It is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch.</em></p>
as quoted in K.C. Cole, Mind over Matter: conversations with the cosmos
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">My own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.</em></p>
Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927), p. 286
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A black hole is where God is dividing by zero. </em></p>
(Attributed to), as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 142
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator? </em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 143
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">In 1915, Einstein introduced his revolutionary General Theory of Relativity. In this, space and time were no longer absolute, no longer a fixed background to events. Instead, they were dynamical quantities that were shaped by the matter and energy in the universe. They were defined only within the universe, so it makes no sense to talk of a time before the universe began. It would be like asking for a point south of the South Pole: it is not defined. </em></p>
“The Origin of the Universe,” Scientific Insights into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Acta 20, 2009
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh … We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos … There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. </em></p>
Apocalypse, 1930
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 236
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 237
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">[Responding to the question of whether he believed in God]: No. You see, what I believe in is something much greater. </em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 259
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">A scientific cosmology can contain no residue of the idea that the world was constructed by some being who is not a part of it … As there can, by definition, be nothing outside the universe, a scientific cosmology must be based on a conception that the universe made itself. This is possible because, since Darwin, we know that structure and complexity can be self-organized … without any need for a maker outside of the system.</em></p>
as quoted in Huberman, The Quotable Atheist, p. 282
<p><em style="line-height: 1.5; background-color: initial;">Abou ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)</em></p><p><em>awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,</em></p><p><em>and saw, within the moonlight of his room,</em></p><p><em>Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,</em></p><p><em>an angel, writing in a book of gold.</em></p><p><em>Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,</em></p><p><em>And to the Presence in the room he said:</em></p><p><em>“What writest thou?” The vision raised its head,</em></p><p><em>And, with a look made of all sweet accord,</em></p><p><em>Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”</em></p><p><em>“And is mine one?” said Abou, “Nay, not so,”</em></p><p><em>Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,</em></p><p><em>But cheerily still, and said, “I pray thee, then,</em></p><p><em>Write me as one who loves his fellow men.”</em></p><p><em>The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night</em></p><p><em>It came again, with a great awakening light,</em></p><p><em>And showed the names whom love of God had blest,</em></p><p><em>And lo! Ben Adhem’s led all the rest.</em></p>
“Abou ben Adhem”
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