On Mysticism VI: Trivia

"The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand." (Gilbert K Chesterton, "Orthodoxy", 1908)

"Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe." (Bertrand Russell, "Mysticism and Logic: And Other Essays", 1910)

"Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment." (Evelyn Underhill, "Practical Mysticism", 1914)

"Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or experience of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience -- one whose religion and life are centered, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge." (Evelyn Underhill, "Mystics of the Church" , 1925)

"[...] sometimes, through the strangely compelling experience of mystical insight, a man knows beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he has been in touch with a reality that lies behind mere phenomena. He himself is completely convinced, but he cannot communicate the certainty. It is a private revelation. He may be right, but unless we share his ecstasy we cannot know." (Edwin P Hubble, "The Nature of Science and Other Lectures", 1954)

"Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold. Such a Nature does not accept abdication, nor skepticism." (Albert Claude, [Nobel lecture] 1974)

"Contrary to the strict division of the activity of the human spirit into separate departments - a division prevailing since the nineteenth century - I consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity, to be the mythos, spoken and unspoken, of our present day and age." (Wolfgang Pauli, "Writings on Physics and Philosophy", 1994)

"The idea of philosophy is a mysterious tradition. Philosophy is, in all, the problem of knowing. It is an undefined Science of the Sciences, a mysticism of the desire for knowledge; it is the very Spirit of the Sciences, and consequently unrepresentable, either in form or application, in the perfect representation of a special science." (Novalis)

"What I see in Nature is a grand design that we can understand only imperfectly, one with which a responsible person must look at with humility. This is a genuine religious feeling and has nothing to do with mysticism." (Albert Einstein)