The goals of science & religion, and our understanding of life:

"The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature.

For him, neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events.

To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal.

For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress ....

If it is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in another sense.

Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover (the) rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim.

It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements.

It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusion.

But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain, is moved by the profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence.

By way of the understanding, he achieves a far reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason, incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man.

This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious in the highest sense of the word.

And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contibutes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life."

The mystic emotion, knowledge, and religious sentiment:

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear, is a dead man.

To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties--this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment.

In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.

There are only two ways to live your life. One is [living] as though nothing is a miracle. The other is [living] as if everything is.

"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."

The Temple of Science, and the Scientific Assembly ...

"The pursuit of scientific truth, detached from the practical interests of everyday life, ought to be treated as sacred by every government, and it is in the higher interests of all that honest servants of the truth should be left in peace."

"In the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither.

Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes.

Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some [people], of both present and past times, left inside."

The cosmic religious experience:

"The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.

No one who does not appreciate the terrific exertions and above all, the devotion without which pioneer creations in scientific thought cannot come into being, can judge the strength of the feeling out of which alone such work, turned away as it is from immediate practical life, can grow.

What a deep faith in the rationality of the world and its structure and what a longing to understand even the smallest glimpses of the reason revealed in the world there must have been in Kepler and Newton ..."

Human beings and their circle of compassion:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space.
We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest.
A kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty...

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive."

==A collection of One Liners ....

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."

"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
. . "One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year."

"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism —-how passionately I hate them!"

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

... one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is....

"A human being is a part of a whole... a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, 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." "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction."

"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones."

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

"God does not play dice with the universe."
[In this, a reference to the then-new theory of Quantum Mechanics, he was wrong.]

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18."

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them."

"Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts."

"Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding."

"Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science."

"Humanity needs a few romantic idols as spots of light in the drab field of earthly existence . . . . The particular choice of person is inexplicable and unimportant." -Einstein, at the age of 70

"To punish me for my contempt of authority, Fate has made me an authority myself." -Einstein, Sept. 18, 1930

"Watch the stars, and from them learn.
To the Master's honor all must turn,
each in its track, without a sound,
forever tracing Newton's ground."

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler."

"When the solution is simple, "God" is answering."

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."
. . "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
. . "It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear --that engendered religion."

"We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?" -Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~Niels Bohr

ASIMOV
On the psychological influence of Luna.
"The Tragedy of the Moon", '73.

The average person is Geocentric, Antropocentric, Ethnocentric, and Egocentric. If all the universe revolves about the Earth, whi is then to doubt that the most important ... object for which the universe was made? And if it is the Earth that is of central importance, must that not be for the sake of man, who is visibly the ruler of the Earth? If man is the ruler of creation, the object for which it was formed, then why should it accept any bars or qualifications to its actions? Mankind is King, its wish is law, and it can do no wrong.

Those religions which are Earth-centered and man-centered make more intellectual sense too, in that case.

And because Geocentricity is not, in fact, an accurate picture of the universe, all scientific inquiry became undesirable. Any investigation that would try to find a non-geocentric picture ... became dangerous to revealed religion.

[destruction of the environment] The clear indication that this will kill humanity, who cannot live without a functioning ecology, seems to bounce off the blank walls of those minds who see a universe built only for the sake of mankind and for no other reason.