Helena Blavatsky Quotes

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.

Naturalism is a counterpart to theism. Theism says there's the physical world and God. Naturalism says there's only the natural world. There are no spirits, no deities, or anything else.

Human spirit, things that aren't tangible, fascinate me, so I'm always researching mind, spirit, soul.

The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.

I call myself a naturalist as opposed to an atheist, but there are different styles. Some people just like to be close to nature. And some people actually worship nature, which is too wishy-washy because - like a lot of religious believers - they don't depend on facts.

Monotheism makes me grouchy. I don't trust any religion that makes God look like one of the ruling class. I guess I'm a pagan or an animist.

Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.

You get these Satanists types that don't believe in God. OK, so you realize you don't get Satan if you don't get God, right? Or atheists that want to believe in ghosts. Wait, wait, wait. You can't have a two-way go on that. You want to be agnostic, be an atheist, fine. But you don't bring ghosts along with you.

I have friends who are scientists, strict materialists, who don't think science and religion are compatible, but I just think most of us - unless you're a strict atheist materialist, which there aren't many of - most of us believe in something outside the material world. And if you do believe that, I don't know how you're not obsessed with it.

I'm very interested in theories in how we exist: how people exist and how souls exist separate from their bodies or their brains.

I should . . . prefer swallowing one incomprehensibility rather than two. It requires one effort only to admit the single incomprehensibility of matter endowed with thought, and two to believe, first that of an existence called spirit, of which we have neither evidence nor idea, and then secondly how that spirit, which has neither extension nor solidity, can put material organs into motion.

I cannot but think that it would be a great step if mankind could familiarise themselves with the idea that they are spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh re spirits incorporated for a time in the flesh.

It is my belief that all gods are stories, or at least the ideas behind stories, but stories or ideas that have become in some way almost alive and aware.

I became an atheist because, as a graduate student studying quantum physics, life seemed to be reducible to second-order differential equations. Mathematics, chemistry and physics had it all. And I didn't see any need to go beyond that.

I believe in spirits, not ghosts.

I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true.

"Spinoza did not seek to found a sect, and he founded none"; yet all philosophy after him is permeated with his thought.

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world. The stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could have produced the human molecule.

I took a course on 'Magic, Alchemy, and Astrology' at Mount Holyoke, and it was a whole new awakening for me, a way of thinking about the world primarily in terms of concepts and words rather than mathematical formulas.

I'm not religious. I'm not an atheist. Would I say I'm an agnostic? Possibly. But I would say the collective unconscious is something I'm much more interested in.

My mother is extremely interested in everything esoteric.

I don't believe in prayer, I'm a pretty hardcore agnostic.