And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. […] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indeciph...
Empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being.
Did being in love itself flood the body with opioids, or cannabinoids, or whatever?
It takes a special energy, over and above one's creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled. It is a gamble as all creative projects...
I only seem to find the right way after making every possible blunder, and finally exhausting all the wrong ways.
I had long wanted to see true indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for...
I did not seem to have any special project to animate me.
يمكننا أن نرى بسهولة في الآخرين ما لا نهتم أو نجرؤ على رؤيته في أنفسنا
يمكن لطفل أن يتابع الكتاب المقدس قبل أن يتابع إقيلدس, ليس لأن الكتاب المقدس أبسط (يمكن قول العكس) بل لأنه مطروح بأسلوب رمزي و قصصي
We have five senses in which we glory and which we recognise and celebrate, senses that constitute the sensible world for us. But there are other senses -- secret senses, sixth senses, if you will --...
I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.
I am sorry I have wasted (and still waste) so much time; I am sorry to be as agonizingly shy at eighty as I was at twenty; I am sorry that I speak no languages but my mother tongue and that I have not...
He reached out his hand, and took hold of his wife’s head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat!
God thinks in numbers,’ Auntie Len used to say. ‘Numbers are the way the world is put together.
For me, this was an example of how unconscious motives may sometimes ally themselves to physiological propensities, of how one cannot abstract an ailment or its treatment from the whole pattern, the c...
And so was Luria, whose words now came back to me: ‘A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being ... It is here ... you may touch him, and see a profound chan...
In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.
Your brain is you in a way in which your heart isn't.
When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, ‘smoked salmon and Bach.’ (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same).
Thus the primal, animal sense of 'the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religious p...