Great Throughts Treasury

"The worst insult I can inflict on life is that I do not reflect on its meaning."

"History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured."

"The most fundamental tragedy of my life is that the ones who I see do not exist and the one who exists I do not see."

"The final discovery is the discovery of knowledge."

"Ask a true scientist a very profound question on his science, and he will be silent. Ask a true religious person a very simple question on his religion, and he will be frenzied."

"The world is a garden of philosophy. God is its gardener; Man is the visitor. And any tree that does not bear fruits of philosophy either does not belong to that garden or is yet to be grown"

"It is impossible to imagine existence void of any intelligence."

"The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a solipsist."

"Knowledge is the end; wisdom is the means."

"Certainty is the most vivid condition of ignorance and the most necessary condition for knowledge."

"The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense."

"Truth may have been found but might never be known."

"The sound of life has divine silence."

"The world is a contradiction, the universe a paradox."

"The more I find life to be a great design, the more I suspect it to be singular in existence; the more I suspect it to be singular, the more I feel it to be specific and personal; the more I feel it to be personal, the more I think of it to be a mere question; And the more I think of it to be a question, the less I understand the questioner. "

"Life is too meaningful to die."

"In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find the ultimate questioner - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question. "

"Most of the history is a divine work of fiction. "

"The existence of God is not logically necessary, and yet, on the basis of some profound peculiar empirical order in the universe, it seems that He exists as the ultimate uncreated Being, implying a paradox, as no logically unnecessary entity can be uncreated. This paradox is the ultimate question asked by God, who is nothing but the ultimate questioner."

"Truth is orphan without matter and matter is impotent without truth."

"At the heart of my metaphysic there is the ultimate question and at the heart of the universe there is the ultimate questioner. "

"Nature, by its very nature, is very brutal and unequal. However, Man has somehow managed to transform the nature of its brutality and inequality."

"There is only one real computer - the universe - whose hardware is made up of non-spatial states of consciousness and software is made up of superhuman as well as non-superhuman thoughts."

"The meaning of life is ‘the ultimate questioner's vanity."

"God may not be omnipotent, but he is omniactive."

"God is a philosophical black hole - the point where reason breaks down."

"Life is painful to be meaningful."

"Life, by which I mean my life, is a great, or probably the greatest, design, from its very beginning to its end, the end that, I think, is unlikely to exist. Each and every bit of life is a part of the design. Design exists as the consequence of the ultimate questioner's vanity. And my mission is to find the most fundamental truth, which probably and exclusively involves the nature of the existence of the ultimate questioner."

"My existence is such that "I" do not really exist. At the end of understanding so much I understand that I know nothing. I suffer for being surrounded by intense suffering and yet I'm deeply suspicious if first of all there is indeed any consciousness except me. I strive to find the artist who might have fathered this great universal art but feel myself to be too feeble to accomplish this seemingly unattainable mission. Yet I have every respect for life, and it is this sheer respect that makes me live."

"Passion is the soul of youth."

"Genius is the ability to see the self-evident where the rest of the world turns blind."

"Mystery is the soul of existence."

"Man is more social within than without."

"If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a ‘time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense."

"The non-spatial nature of consciousness makes it possible for any apparently unconscious entity to be conscious, and vice versa."

"One of the great intellectual mistakes Einstein made is that he thought that space and time are physically or ontologically entangled. In the present non-spatial universal computational program, space and time happen to be entangled to the extent that, under certain unique circumstances, changes in spatial measurements indicate changes in temporal ones. However, a change in the program itself may cause space and time to disentangle."

"In the midst of excitement, grief, joy, and solitude, I remind myself every moment that the sole mission of my life is to find "the ultimate questioner" - that unimaginable who has put me in this madness to answer an unanswerable question."

"Truth is orphan without matter, and matter is impotent without truth."

"Meditation is the best engineering."