The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.
How irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of th...
Ven mazel kumt, shtelt im a shtul. When mazel comes, pull up a chair for it. (p. 292)
The necessary incompleteness of even our formal systems of thought demonstrates that there is no nonshifting foundation on which any system rests. All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as...
Since physics is poetry, then poetry is physics, he propounded.
It’s a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it’s happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prev...
It was intolerable what lay hidden within another, intolerable tat you could not divide one person into another with no remainder.
Genius in a person was like weed that takes over the entire garden, that won't allow anything else to grow. (p. 251)
Einstein’s and Gödel’s metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality—existing independent of our thinking of it—or, rather,...
Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.
A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world.
Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to.
Is death one of those adventures from which I can’t emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists . . . A person whom one h...
I feel an immediate closeness to anyone who loves New York or hates Los Angeles. Either condition is sufficient, but I’ve found that satisfaction of the one usually entails satisfaction of the other.
For Jascha, artistic creation was the most private activity in the world: the soul's sacred and solitary communion with itself. (p. 244)
And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)
2. The Ontological Argument Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of God). It is greater to exist than not to exist. If we conceive of God as not exis...
One evangelical scientist who had felt his doubts falling away from him when he was hiking in the mountains and came upon a frozen waterfall—in fact a trinity of a frozen waterfall, with three parts t...
Epimeleia heautou,
The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more...