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...
Hershel Blau, son of the Chasidic wandering preacher, was not yet so distant from his father's world that he didn't know deep in his soul the yearning to fly. What is a Chasid's dance but one long, su...
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,...
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.
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.
And by the way, Sherlock Holmes is Jewish. He changed his name. I'm surprised you nerver guessed it. (p. 248)
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...
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...
The only object we truly possess is our own mind. The only pleasure over which we have complete dominion is the progress of our own understanding.
The mistake of all the religions is to look outside the world for explanations of the world, rather than rethinking the world itself, so that it offers up its own explanations for itself. The world it...
Pythagoras, should he want to continue on for a degree in modern-day mathematics, would have to learn to abide far more counterintuitive results than numbers that cannot be written as ratios between w...