What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches
Erwin Schrödinger
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he virtually never says anything at all.”
“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”
“Our [Western] science has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. This is precisely the point where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.”
“When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply”
“We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.”
“In brief: consciousness is a phenomenon in the zone of evolution. This world lights up to itself only where or only inasmuch as it develops, procreates new forms. Places of stagnancy slip from consciousness; they may only appear in their interplay with places of evolution. If this is granted it follows that consciousness and discord with one's own self are inseparably linked up, even that they must, as it were, be proportional to each other. This sounds a paradox, but the wisest of all times and peoples have testified to confirm it. Men and women for whom this world was lit in an unusually light of awareness, and who by life and word have, more than others, formed and transformed that work of art which we call humanity, testify by speech and writing or even by their lives that more than others have they been torn by the pangs of inner discord. Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been begotten.”
“In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.”
“Next to want, boredom has become the worst scourge in our lives.”
“Let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' - am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature.”
“A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it.”
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Book Keywords:
mathematics, knowledge, consciousness-mind-brain, contradiction, matter, consciousness, truth, west, life, physics, sincerity, dreams, self-awareness, philosophy, east, science, mind
