Physical World Quotes

Nur once heard it said that a woman's sphere is actually less constrained than a man's. Because whilst he may travel outside in the physical world, her internal world is limitless, set only by the boundaries of her imagination. This life within the mind is a skill that men do not always take the time to learn . . . unless, perhaps, they are of a particularly spiritual bent. ~ Lucy Foley

What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you? ~ Neal Stephenson

The physical world exists, but that's only the paint and canvas; that's only the instrument we use to make music; that's only the stage where the play is performed. ~ Dennis Vickers

The universe is not a world of separate things and events but is a cosmos that is connected and coherent. The physical world and spiritual experience are both aspects of the same reality and man and the universe were one ~ Alexis Karpouzos

Scientists explore the physical world for REPRODUCIBLE PATTERNS, which they represent by MODELS and organize into THEORIES according to LAWS. ~ David Hestenes

Protection against this general monopoly is as difficult as protection against pollution. People will face a danger that threatens their own self-interest but not one that threatens society as a whole. Many more people are against cars than are against driving them. They are against cars because they pollute and because they monopolize traffic. They drive cars
because they consider the pollution created by one car insignificant, and because they do not feel personally deprived of freedom when they drive. It is also difficult to be protected against monopoly when a society is already littered with roads, schools, or hospitals, when independent action has been paralyzed for so long that the ability for it seems to have atrophied, and when simple alternatives seem beyond the reach of the imagination. Monopoly is hard to get 4d of when it has frozen not
only the shape of the physical world but also the range of behavior and of imagination. Radical monopoly is generally discovered only when it is too late. ~ Ivan Illich

As far as our relation to the physical world, I doubt there will be much more improvement. Our basic survival needs have been met, and much of our current progress is superfluous or downright troublesome. Most advancement is performed out of comfort rather than necessity. What we are lacking, what the world so desperately needs now, is adjustments of the mind. We need to see the world again with fresh eyes, and come to an understanding of who we are as individuals, and what drives us. ~ Chris Matakas

To create and to annihilate material substance, cause it to aggregate in forms according to his desire, would be the supreme manifestation of the power of Man's mind, his most complete triumph over the physical world ... ~ Nikola Tesla

Meditation allows us to reach the level of the soul by easing past the tangle of thoughts and emotions that usually keep our attention bound to the physical world. When we close our eyes to meditate, thoughts spring up spontaneously. ~ Deepak Chopra

I think that you will see different types of content emerging, just the same as new media generates new content in the physical world. TV created new content, but it didn't mean that radio disappeared. ~ Donna Dubinsky

I think there's something to the idea that the divine dwells more easily in text than in images. Text allows for more abstract thought, more of a separation between you and the physical world, more room for you and God to meet in the middle. I find it hard enough to conceive of an infinite being. Imagine if those original scrolls came in the form of a graphic novel with pictures of the Lord? I'd never come close to communing with the divine. ~ A. J. Jacobs

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world. ~ Andrea Barrett

No doubt it often happens that a child possesses qualities of his ancestors which were perhaps missing in his parents, or even two or three generations back; however, this is another heritage, a heritage which is known to us as such. I might express this by saying that a soul borrows a property from the spheres of the jinn, and a more concrete property from the physical world; and as it borrows this property, together with this transaction it takes upon itself the taxation and the obligations as well as the responsibilities which are attached to the property. Very often the property is not in proper repair, and damage has been done to it, and it falls to his lot to repair it; and if there be a mortgage on that property that becomes his due. Together with the property he becomes the owner of the records and the contracts of the property which he owns. In this is to be found the secret of what is called Karma. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

So slip on your goggles and your reading trunks, for the sun is high. Let me leave you with one more thought. In what season of the year do we find ourselves - I'm speaking for a moment in terms of the physical world - wading through things? Surf. Kelp. Books. Summer. ~ Roy Blount, Jr.

For years now, I have waited to grow up. The truth, that I've learned, is that age has no reality except in the physical world. Our essence, of being human, is resistant to the passage of time. Our core and inner selves can remain eternal. Which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we thought we were in full bloom. As for me, I'm still quite a child inside.. ~ Jose N Harris

The new coherent picture is not yet available. With all their immense empirical success, G(eneral)R(elativity) and Q(uantum)M(echanics) have left us with an understanding of the physical world which is unclear and badly fragmented. At the foundations of physics there is today confusion and incoherence. ~ Carlo Rovelli

The soul is the immortal part of us. It recycles, over and over again from what I've seen, but it never dies. We're meant to strive beyond the physical world, not ... not settle for it and only it ... ~ Alyson Noel

All general maxims in politics ought to be established with great caution; and that irregular and extraordinary appearances are frequently discovered in the moral, as well as in the physical world ~ David Hume

I have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was inferred or extrapolated from the content of any religions document. ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Western science has made nature intelligible in terms of its symmetries and regularities, analyzing its most wayward forms into components of a regular and measurable shape. As a result we tend to see nature and to deal with it as an "order" from which the element of spontaneity has been "screened out." But this order is maya, and the "true suchness" of things has nothing in common with the purely conceptual aridities of perfect squares, circles, or triangles - except by spontaneous accident. Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of of the universe break down. and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a "principle of uncertainty. ~ Alan W. Watts

We're moving into an era when things are dematerialised and much more holographic. Floating above the physical world and the geographic map, there's another landscape that's constantly changing - something like a cloud - of communication, information, exchange and commerce. ~ Doug Aitken

The world won't necessarily change but your understanding of it will, and therefore the world will change. Your attention will no longer be confined to the physical body and the physical world. ~ Frederick Lenz

The Tantric view is that there is already a complete Buddha dormant within each of us, but we've individually and collectively become addicted to horror movies that we mistake for documentaries. From this perspective, our whole society is caught up in a kind of shared horror story, imagining ourselves as zombie consumers rather than empowered citizens: afraid, insecure, incapable beings who have no choice but to wander through life grasping after fleeting pleasures, needlessly competing with each other instead of collaborating, isolating ourselves from the plight of those whose stories we don't understand. Because our whole society is both constructing and watching this shared screenplay simultaneously, the physical world begins to take on the qualities of this horror movie, and it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the theater of our experience from the screen of our own projections. ~ Ethan Nichtern

Sometimes what is 'real' because it takes place in the physical world, like 9/11, is so unreal on the level of the soul. Then other things, which in terms of the physical world seem so magical and unbelievable, on the level of the soul seem very real. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Both outer and inner phenomena arise as a result of causes and conditions. Outer phenomena, the things of the physical world, arise in a series of seven steps. The texts use the example of a seed giving rise to a plant that gives rise to a fruit. The seven steps are: seed, sprout, leaflets, stemmed plant, bud, flower, fruit. Each stage succeeds the previous one in time and in order, each giving rise to the next. ~ Dharma Publishing

The goal of the human experience is to transform ourselves from being who long to attain power in the physical world to beings who are empowered from within. ~ Caroline Myss

The ripple that travels across water does not begin on its own. In order to create positive change one must act upon the intention. Creating a new idea is simple, but is just the beginning. Manifesting an idea into our perceived reality, the physical world, requires action to begin and diligence to maintain, just like any habit that already exists ~ Gary Hopkins

Plato and Aristotle.....survived to become the twin pillars of philosophic and scientific thinking in the Western world, supporting the massive edifice of Christianity. Plato's Theory of Forms, with it's inherent contempt for the physical world, and Aristotle's biological dualism, in which females were seen as failed males, provided the intellectual apparatus for the centuries of misogyny that were to follow. ~ Jack Holland

Dreams are an insight into our psychology: they are what we are, but stripped of the conventions and norms of psychology, and the rules of the physical world… ~ Belsebuub

Between the borders of Faerie and the physical world stands an ancient forest where the trees are exceedingly tall; and although no longer visible to men, their roots go deep into its earth. ~ Gabriel Brunsdon

The two great agents of the physical world have become subject to the will of man and have been made subservient to his wants and enjoyments; I allude to steam and electricity, under whatever name the latter may be called. ~ John C. Calhoun

One of the more radical concepts in this philosophy is that God is only Mind. Anything we experience is an idea in the Mind of God, and since only Mind is real, anything material, physical, corporeal, etc. must be an illusion, only an idea. The entire physical world with all of its complexity is just an illusory thought, and if we believe something is solid, permanent, or objective, we are deluding ourselves. In this philosophy everything happens in our minds, and any change we want to see must take place in our minds. ~ Edwin Navarro

Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. While our perception of the physical world can always be distorted, our perception of mathematical truths can't be. They are objective, persistent, necessary truths. A mathematical formula or theorem means the same thing to anyone anywhere – no matter what gender, religion, or skin color; it will mean the same thing to anyone a thousand years from now. And what's also amazing is that we own all of them. No one can patent a mathematical formula, it's ours to share. There is nothing in this world that is so deep and exquisite and yet so readily available to all. That such a reservoir of knowledge really exists is nearly unbelievable. It's too precious to be given away to the "initiated few." It belongs to all of us. ~ Edward Frenkel

The usual method of creation for most human beings is a three-step process involving thought, word, and deed or action. First comes thought; the formative idea; the initial concept. Then comes the word. Most thoughts ultimately form themselves into words, which are often then written or spoken. This gives added energy to the thought, pushing it out into the world, where it can be noticed by others. Finally, in some cases words are put into action, and you have what you call a result; a physical world manifestation of what all started with a thought. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world. ~ Julian Baggini

The world we are trying to transcend is not the physical world of air, sunlight, and ocean. After all, that world, even with all of its problems, is an amazingly beautiful world. Our problem is with the world that mind has constructed. Can we see that there is a mental world that we have created somewhere in our consciousness? It is a mind-created world that we have been living in forever. When we open our eyes, we see the outer world. We can walk outside near the ocean for just ten or twenty minutes and we see a beautiful world with sand, rocks, waves; the ocean is singing a song. It is a beautiful world. There is nothing wrong with that world. It is perfect, sacred in itself.

The world that we must transcend is the world that mind has constructed. That world has lots of problems, lots of drama, lots of stories, and lots of suffering. It's a forever spinning wheel of painfulness, agony, and so forth. ~ Anam Thubten

It's to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It's what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. Our lovers share us with the passing trade. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What's left? What else is there that hasn't been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what's shared - she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she's everybody's and it don't mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it's held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it's gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part o ~ Tom Stoppard

There is a correlation between evil. There is a primary evil that comes directly from the Devil. Even though all evil stems from the Devil, the Devil sometimes interacts with people in the physical world and the spiritual world and sometimes there's just plain evil that people do to one another. And I've seen plenty of that over the course of 20 years. ~ Ralph Sarchie

The Truth is always trying to reveal itslef to us in our physical world. ~ Matthew A. Petti

This physical world has no two things alike.
Every comparison is awkwardly rough.

You can put a lion next to a man,
but the placing is hazardous to both. ~ Rumi

The spiritual world is connected with the physical world. The common factor connecting all things is true love. ~ Sun Myung Moon

It is one of the perils of our so-called civilized age that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between soul and landscape - between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us, and we need it in privacy, intimacy, and surety. We need the field from which the lark rises - bird that is more than itself, that is the voice of the universe: vigorous, godly job. Without the physical world such hope it: hacked off. Is: dried up. Without wilderness no fish could leap and flash, no deer could bound soft as eternal waters over the field; no bird could open its wings and become buoyant, adventurous, valorous beyond even the plan of nature. Nor could we. ~ Mary Oliver

God created us in such a way that our inner self is in the spiritual world and our outer self is in the physical world. This was so that the spiritual part of us, which belongs in heaven, could be planted in the physical part the way a seed is planted in the ground. ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. ~ Vannevar Bush

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals. ~ Thomas Huxley

In 1975, ... [speaking with Shiing Shen Chern], I told him I had finally learned ... the beauty of fiber-bundle theory and the profound Chern-Weil theorem. I said I found it amazing that gauge fields are exactly connections on fiber bundles, which the mathematicians developed without reference to the physical world. I added, "this is both thrilling and puzzling, since you mathematicians dreamed up these concepts out of nowhere." He immediately protested: "No, no. These concepts were not dreamed up. They were natural and real." ~ Chen-Ning Yang

Some say that you should not want money at all because the desire for money is materialistic and not Spiritual. But we want you to remember that you are here in this very physical world where Spirit has materialized. You cannot separate yourself from the aspect of yourself that is Spiritual, and while you are here in these bodies you cannot separate yourselves from that which is physical or material. All of the magnificent things of a physical nature that are surrounding you are Spiritual in nature. ~ Esther Hicks

In his book Opticks, Newton made it clear that he did not believe that the laws of nature by themselves were sufficient to explain the universe's existence-God was the creator and sustainer of all the atoms that make up the cosmic matter: "For it became him [God] who created them [the atoms] to set them in order. And if he did so, it's unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature." In other words, to Newton, God was a mathematician (among other things), not just as a figure of speech, but almost literally-the Creator God brought into existence a physical world that was governed by mathematical laws. ~ Mario Livio

During the late afternoon and early evening there is a specific dimension that interconnects with our physical world. This particular dimension can be visualized as series of horizontally shaped geometric planes that extent out into infinity. ~ Frederick Lenz

On this material plane, each living being is like a street lantern lamp with a dirty lampshade.

The inside flame burns evenly and is of the same quality as all the rest - hence all of us are equal in the absolute sense, the essence, in the quality of our energy.

However, some of the lamps are "turned down" and having less light in them, burn fainter, (the beings have a less defined individuality, are less in tune with the universal All which is the same as the Will) - hence all of us are unequal in a relative sense, some of us being more aware (human beings), and others being less aware (animal beings), with small wills and small flames.

The lampshades of all are stained with the clutter of the material reality or the physical world.

As a result, it is difficult for the light of each lamp to shine through to the outside and it is also difficult to see what is on the other side of the lampshade that represents the external world (a great thick muddy ocean of fog), and hence to "feel" a connection with the other lantern lamps (other beings).

The lampshade is the physical body immersed in the ocean of the material world, and the limiting host of senses that it comes with.

The dirt of the lampshade results from the cluttering bulk of life experience accumulated without a specific goal or purpose.

The dirtier the lampshade, the less connection each soul has to the rest of the universe - and this includes ~ Vera Nazarian

The essence of life, I concluded, did not lie in the material. It penetrated, but was not bound to, the physical world of science. ~ Charles Lindbergh

Travelling, whether in the mental or the physical world, is a joy, and it is good to know that, in the mental world at least, there are vast countries still very imperfectly explored ~ Bertrand Russell

In Gnosticism, the physical world did not ultimately matter - which meant physical suffering did not matter either. Seeking 'enlightenment' meant cultivating an attitude of detachment, even indifference. ~ Nancy Pearcey

The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine. ~ Vera Kistiakowsky

The unsolved problems of the physical world now seem even more formidable than those solved in the twentieth century.

Though in application it works splendidly, we do not even understand the physical meaning of quantum mechanics, much less how it might be united with general relativity.

We don't know why the dimensionless constants (ratios of masses of elementary particles, ratios of strength of gravitational to electric forces, fine structure constant, etc.) have the values they do, unless we appeal to the implausible anthropic principle, which seems like a regression to Aristotelian teleology. ~ Gerald Holton

To me, what you want to do is find a way to let this play out between the virtual world and the physical world ... Ultimately, I think society will get there. It will be messy, but we'll get there. ~ Eric Schmidt

The world of the rayons is the quasi non-physical world. It is the birth place of quanta - the worlds of the fermions and the bosons. ~ Amit Ray

...the realization that the mind's ability to affect the physical world could be ~ Dan Brown

Gods, like humans," he said, "are order imposed on chaos. With humans, the imposition is easy to see. Millions of cells, long twisted chains of atoms, so much bone and blood and juice, every piece performing its function. When one of those numberless pumps refuses to beat, when one of those infinitesimal pipes gets blocked, all the pent-up chaos springs forward like a bent sword, and the soul is lost to the physical world unless something catches it first. ~ Max Gladstone

The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one's desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair. ~ Wallace Stevens

The physical universe that you see is all in your mind. When you turn your mind off, or become unconscious, the physical universe, for you, disappears. Then, when you awaken your consciousness, the universe reappears magically. Quite simple really - no thoughts on your part, no physical world. As Walt Whitman succinctly stated: "The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual - namely to You." Without your mind to process it, the universe simply disappears into nothingness. ~ Wayne Dyer

Without money, you are powerless in this world. You are totally subject to whatever happens. To be without money in the physical world is to be powerless. ~ Frederick Lenz

Psychological traumas are far more devastating than physical. world is thriving on both to make Muslims uncomfortable. ~ Nighat Hafiz

Because of our forgetfulness, God has created the physical world to be mnemonic, to help us daily remember that we are not alone, that we are not at the center, that life is not primarily about us, and that there is a grander story than the little stories of our individual lives. Physical things are meant to remind us of the grandeur and glory of the One who created all those things, set them in motion, and keeps them together by the awesome power of his will. ~ Paul David Tripp

Human being's possess the cognitive ability to survey and study the biological and cultural constraints that influence us in order to gain an enhanced understanding of who each of us are. Comprehension of what comprises a self allows human beings to monitor and regulate their thoughts and actions and therefore revise and modify their sense of self. How much conscious control we assert over our minds as well as what decisions through default we leave essentially unregulated and in the sole providence of the unconscious mind determines our self-identity. Self-identity in turns affects personal decision-making, which alters our external world. The combined impact of millions of people making conscious choices exerts a profound impact upon reality, the physical world that is constantly in flux. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Hope is something that is built from small parts. Perceived actions. Observed effects. Imperfect understanding. Uncertain knowledge. Acknowledged fears. The things each of us projects and says and does in the physical world. Hope then is made up of tiny bits and pieces of us. All of us, together. ~ David Amerland

There is the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world. So it is with our lives – our very next moment can occur along the most probable path or it can occur on a path entirely discontinuous with the expectations that others have for us, but more likely in line with the expectations that we have for ourselves. ~ Kevin Michel

That's what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask. ~ Ryu Murakami

… experimental evidence … strongly suggests that the mechanistic order is inadequate as a fundamental characterization of the architecture of the physical world. ~ Paavo Pylkkänen

Scientists do what writers do. They also live with an active interiority, only the ongoing speculation in their heads is about relations in the physical world rather than the psychological one. ~ Vivian Gornick

But why has our physical world revealed such extreme mathematical regularity that astronomy superhero Galileo Galilei proclaimed nature to be "a book written in the language of mathematics," and Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner stressed the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences" as a mystery demanding an explanation? ~ Max Tegmark

Human rights in cyberspace are really no different from rights in the physical world. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Science affects all our ways of thinking about the world: both the physical world, which, if I may make so bold, is easy to understand because it is regular and follows simple laws, and also the social world, which is more baffling and less predictable. ~ Arthur Lewis

There is a correlation between the physical and spiritual worlds but only attachment to the physical world causes emotional suffering. ~ Daniel Marques

Because we are not wrestling against basar vadahm (flesh and blood), but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of the choshech (darkness) of the Olam Hazeh (physical world), against the kokhot ruchaniyim ra'im (evil spiritual forces) in Shomayim (The Heavens)." ~ Ephesus 6:12 ~ Rachel A. Marks

I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world - the trades - was the place you ended up if you weren't bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now. ~ Kristin Kimball

The creation of virtual worlds had taken the place of advances in the physical world. "You can say the whole Internet has something very escapist to it, ~ George Packer

I believe that we haven't begun to understand the many forces that bind the physical world, any more than we understand our own minds and what they're capable of. ~ Tamora Pierce

The biology of empathy allows us to comprehend our connection to each other, to other living things, and to the physical world that supports life. ~ George Lakoff

We understand today that the physical universe is bigger and older and operates very differently than how the biblical writers, and all other ancient people, thought. Many Christians stumble over this, thinking they are showing respect for the Bible and obeying God by making the biblical story mesh with modern science, or rejecting modern science entirely in favor of God's Word. But there is no need to feel embarrassed or unfaithful by acknowledging that ancient writers wrote from an ancient mind-set. When ancient Israelites wrote as they did about the physical world, they were expressing their faith in God in ways that fit their understanding. It shouldn't get our knickers in a twist to admit that, from a scientific point of view, they were wrong. That doesn't make their faith or the God behind it all any less genuine. ~ Peter Enns

We are each a product of our biological endowments, culture, and personal history. Culture ideology and cultural events along with transmitted cultural practices influences each of us. We are each the product of our collective interchanges. Our county's domestic and interlinked international conflicts fuse us together. We are each a molecule in the helix of human consciousness joined in a physical world. We form a coil of connective tissue soldered together by cultural links. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Of course, Einstein was a very great scientist indeed, and I have enormous respect for him, and great admiration for the discoveries he made. But he was very committed to a view of the objectivity of the physical world. ~ John Polkinghorne

For pain is perhaps but a violent pleasure? Who could determine the point where pleasure becomes pain, where pain is still a pleasure? Is not the utmost brightness of the ideal world soothing to us, while the lightest shadows of the physical world annoy? ~ Honore De Balzac

After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form? ~ Tad Williams

In the physical world, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a wanted man. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived, said good old Berkeley; but, according to most philosophers, he was wrong. Yet, obviously, there are things for which the adage holds. Perception, trivially, to begin with. If elements of conscious awareness
pains, tickles, feelings of heat and cold, sensory qualia of colors, sounds, and the like
have any existence, it must consist in their being perceived by a subject ... This shows, of course, that such experiences are epiphenomenal, at least with respect to the physical world. ~ Zeno Vendler

We - each of us - are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it. ~ Eben Alexander

Perhaps the main basis for the claim that quantum mechanics is weird is the existence of what Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance'. These effects are not only 'spooky' but are also absolutely impossible to achieve within the framework of classical physics. However, if the conception of the physical world is changed from one made out of tiny rock-like entities to a holistic global informational structure that represents tendencies to real events to occur, and in which the choice of which potentiality will be actualized in various places is in the hands of human agents, there is no spookiness about the occurring transfers of information. The postulated global informational structure called the quantum state of the universe is the 'spook' that does the job. But it does so in a completely specified and understandable way, and this renders it basically non-spooky. ~ Paul Davies

Human logic [emphasis added] was forced on us by the physical world and is therefore consistent with it. Mathematics derives from logic. This is why mathematics is consistent with the physical world. ~ Jef Raskin

The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions ~ Aldous Huxley

In a photograph, if I am able to evoke not alone a feeling of the reality of the surface physical world but also a feeling of the reality of existence that lies mysteriously and invisibly beneath its surface, I feel I have succeeded. At their best, photographs as symbols not only serve to help illuminate some of the darkness of the unknown, they also serve to lessen the fears that too often accompany the journeys from the known to the unknown. ~ Wynn Bullock

The study of the powers that shape, maintain and alter the state is the basis of all political insight and leads to the understanding that the law of power governs the world of states just as the law of gravity governs the physical world. ~ Ludwin Von Rochau

Science seeks to eliminate dualistic thinking in order to create a unified understanding that lends itself to greater simplicity. It is possible that scientific inquiry into the spiritual - such as through the methodology of Steiner's spiritual science - could eliminate the spiritual/physical dichotomy and produce a greater understanding of what we call spiritual experience and how it relates to the physical world. ~ Michael Szul

Envy is the root of all negativity. To eliminate envy is to achieve peace in both spirituality and in the physical world. ~ Rahim Mawji

The passion for exploration and discovery, the hunger to learn all things about all aspects of the physical world, the great and preposterous optimism that held that such truths were in fact discoverable, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns - these remarkable traits so characterized the British 18th century ~ Caroline Alexander

In reality, as any physicist will tell you, the physical world is made up of moving energy. All matter is energy. ~ Frederick Lenz

The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels - whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one's outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. Tu put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid - none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives. ~ Robert Macfarlane

There have been a lot of Smedries over the centuries," he said, "and a lot of Talents. Many of them tend to be similar, in the long run. There are four kinds: Talents that affect space, time, knowledge, and the physical world."

"Take my talent, for instance," he continued. "I change things in space. I can get lost, then get found again."

"What about grandpa Smedry?"

"Time," Kas said. "He arrives late to things. Australia, however, has a Talent that can change the physical world--in this case, her own shape. Her Talent is fairly specific, and not as broad as your grandfather's. For instance, there was a Smedry a couple of centuries back who could look ugly any time he wanted, not just when he woke up in the morning. Other have been able to change anyone's appearance, not just their own. Understand?"

I shrugged. "I guess so."

"The closer the Talent gets to its purest form, the more powerful it is," Kaz said. "Your grandfather's Talent is very pure--he can manipulate time in a lot of different circumstances. Your father and I have very similar Talents--I can get lost and Attica can lose things--and both are flexible."

"What about Sing?" I asked.

"Tripping. That's what we call a knowledge Talent--he knows how to do something normal with extraordinary ability. Like Australia, though, his power isn't very flexible."

I nodded slowly. "So...what does this have to do with me?"

"Well, it' ~ Brandon Sanderson

And then I went back into my room, locked into a sequence as perfect as a pattern, and I sat down on my great rock throne, invisible to the outside world but palpable beneath me, and from how my face felt I thought maybe I was crying, either because I didn't want to do this or because I did, it was hard to tell and anyway I never would, who would believe me in either case and who would be there to believe me in all cases, it was a puzzle, I had yet to learn the way of the jigsaw, and so I positioned the rifle beneath my chin, it feels cold, like an actual thing in the actual present physical world, OK, there it is, I am here now, and then I lay down on my belly and listened to the rising squall beyond the door. ~ John Darnielle

I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson.

"Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson?

No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye. ~ Douglas Adams