Insights
Many of the following quotes open chapters in the book. We found them wise as well as provocative – you may enjoy them, too.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.
- Lillian Smith, writer and social critic
Emotions are first and foremost experienced in relation to the body, and it is via the body that they are expressed.
- Rhawn Joseph, neurologist
[These] mysterious and dominant feelings which surge up within us from unknown sources – are they not pure perturbations of the ‘psyche’?
- Walter Cannon, physiologist
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.
- John Wheeler, physicist
Feelings bear witness to the state of life deep within.
- Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist
“I think, therefore I am” is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
- Milan Kundera, novelist
Until we bring sensory affect back into consideration, we shall be fishing for consciousness in an empty pool.
- Nicholas Humphrey, neurophilosopher
The peepholes of life. Senses to detect the world…Throughout our lives, until the peepholes of the senses close, we are sentient beings, sensing the energy and chemicals and objects in our environments.
- Jillyn Smith, author
For the world is not to be narrowed ‘til it will go into the understanding…but the understanding is to be expanded and opened ‘til it can take in the image of the world.
- Francis Bacon
Do you remember how electrical currents and ‘unseen waves’ were laughed at? The knowledge about man was still in its infancy.
- Albert Einstein
To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.
- Copernicus
The time will come when our successors will be surprised that we did not know such obvious things.
- Seneca
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
- Aldous Huxley
I am psychic…It is not something I have gone looking for. I have suppressed and denied it…and I have argued about it endlessly, but only with myself…I am convinced that there is a silent group of psychics in our culture, ridiculed and confused, lacking reproducible data and waiting to come into the spotlight.
- Letter (name withheld) to the Editor of Newsweek
Can you tell me someone who can spot after-shave at 50 paces – and it can set him off and give him migraines – has a psychological illness?
- A father’s comment about his son in the Sydney Morning Herald
Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
- Friedrich Nietzche
We’re a nation of closet mystics. And I think the time has arrived when we should come out of the closet.
- Daniel Goleman, author
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
- William Blake
Soul is another name for what the body does..
- Morris Berman, philospoher
I am too much of a skeptic to deny the possibility of anything.
- T.H. Huxley
The body is clearly an instrument of physical processes…This sensitive instrument also has the ability to tune into the psyche: to listen to its subtle voice, hear its silent music and search into its darkness for meaning.
- Marilyn Mathew, psychotherapist
Researchers who study cognition apart from personality do so at their own risk.
- Joseph Glicksohn, neuroscientist
If science searches the universe – as it does – for certain kinds of truth, then these are inevitably the only ones it will find. Everything else will slip through the net.
- David Darling, astrophysicist
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
- Antoine de Saint Exupéry, novelist
Scientists and artists are both searching for truth but they’re not the same kind of truth. The scientist is looking for truth in the…inanimate physical world. Whereas the artist is looking for an emotional truth, a truth that is inherently rooted in our human existence.
- Alan Lightman, physicist and author
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of our science.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.
- William James
Often, the biggest impediment to scientific progress is not what we don’t know, but what we know.
- Robert Sapolsky, biologist and neuroscientist
Because we have repeated our ignorance, one to the other, we have mistaken it for knowledge.
- Tom Regan, philosopher
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every conceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing.
- T.H. Huxley
What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.
- Bertrand Russell
You either hug the coast or head for blue water.
- Edward O. Wilson, biologist
A new view of nature is emerging, which encompasses both galaxies and neurons, gravitation and life, molecules and emotions. As a culmination of centuries of studying nature, mankind has been approaching the thorniest subject of all: ourselves.
- Piero Scaruffi, cognitive scientist
With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?
- Henry David Thoreau