Heinz Pagels famous quotes

04-17-2025

The visible world is the invisible organization of energy.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Science #Organization #Religion
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Commitment #Science #Reason
Science is not the enemy of humanity but one of the deepest expressions of the human desire to realize that vision of infinite knowledge. Science shows us that the visible world is neither matter nor spirit; the visible world is the invisible organization of energy.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Organization #Expression #Humanity
Science cannot resolve moral conflicts, but it can help to more accurately frame the debates about those conflicts.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Science #Helping #Moral
There was emptiness more profound than the void between the stars, for which there was no here and there and before and after, and yet out of that void the entire plenum of existence sprang forth.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Stars #Profound #Void
As I continued to fall into the dark void, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Stars #Fall #Dark
The world changed from having the determinism of a clock to having the contingency of a pinball machine.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Machines #World #Clock
Possession of a program with unique analytic capabilities puts a scientist in as much of a priveleged position to make new discoveries as the possession of a powerful telescope.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Powerful #Unique #Discovery
Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Shows
The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration.
-- Heinz Pagels

#People #Simplicity #Progress
Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Stars #Animal #Secret
Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Feelings #Survival #Reason
It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Stars #Animal #Clouds
Theoretical and experimental physicists are now studying nothing at all-the vacuum. But that nothingness contains all of being.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Vacuums #Study #Theory
Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Science #Land #Complexity
The words are strung together, with their own special grammar-the laws of quantum theory-to form sentences, which are molecules. Soon we have books, entire libraries, made out of molecular "sentences." The universe is like a library in which the words are atoms. Just look at what has been written with these hundred words! Our own bodies are books in that library, specified by the organization of molecules-but the universe and literature are organizations of identical, interchangeable objects; they are information systems.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Book #Law #Organization
A good simulation, be it a religious myth or scientific theory, gives us a sense of mastery over experience. To represent something symbolically, as we do when we speak or write, is somehow to capture it, thus making it one's own. But with this appropriation comes the realization that we have denied the immediacy of reality and that in creating a substitute we have but spun another thread in the web of our grand illusion.
-- Heinz Pagels

#Religious #Writing #Science

You may also like:

Abraham Pais
Physicist
Ann Druyan
Author
Bart D. Ehrman
Professor
Elaine Pagels
Professor
George P. Shultz
Former United States Secretary of State
Gerald Brenan
Writer
John D. Barrow
Physicist
John Dominic Crossan
John Gribbin
Science writer
Knut Hamsun
Author
Leo Rosten
Teacher
Marilyn Ferguson
Author
Murray Gell-Mann
Physicist
Nyanaponika Thera
Author
Peter Hessler
Writer
Pim Fortuyn
Dutch Politician
Sam Nunn
Former United States Senator
Seth Lloyd
Professor
Steven Weinberg
Theoretical Physicist
Virginia Hamilton
Author