Rational Exploration Quotes

[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.

Its a consequence of the experience of science. As you learn more and more about the universe, you find you can understand more and more without any reference to supernatural intervention, so you lose interest in that possibility. Most scientists I know dont care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science-that it has made it possible for people not to be religious.

I believe that the more thoroughly science is studied, the further does it take us from anything comparable to atheism.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything and his attempt to make sense of the world primarily through his intellect.

From religion comes a man's purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hands are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.

We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way.

We are going to follow wherever the facts lead us.

Art includes everything which stimulates the desire to live; science includes everything which sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

Mathematics is the bold luxury of pure reason, one of the few that remain today.

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.