Rupert Sheldrake Quotes

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

There can sometimes be this fear among laypeople: 'I don't understand everything in science perfectly, so I just can't say anything about it.' I think it's good to know that we scientists are also confused some of the time.

It's important that everyone realizes how much scientists still don't know.

Sometimes it's bad to do something you've never done before.

The role I see for my books is trying to think through the consequences of various things because a lot of the issues around technology and the nuances in it are not usually widely appreciated. That's how I view my writing as I sort of explore this terra incognita ahead of us in an effort to try to understand where we might be heading.

I don't think that science is complete at all. We don't understand everything, and one can see, within science itself, there are many inconsistencies. We just have to accept that we don't understand.

Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks.

When you are on the very frontier of science, everything is chaotic.

We kind of know there's no more frontiers in the physical world. So the frontiers move from where we haven't been yet to where we've been and abandoned.

The Osage have this lovely phrase: 'Travelers in the Mist.' It was the term for part of an Osage clan that would take the lead whenever the tribe was venturing into unfamiliar realms. And, in a way, we are all travelers in the mist. The challenge is that, as writers, we sometimes want to ignore this murkiness, or we want to write around it.

There's a lot of faith expressed by scientists about science. It's kind of an act of faith that science is a good thing. We don't know that for sure. We may not know that millions of years from now.

Space is big. The whole point of the frontier is that we go there to do new things in new places - not one place, and not one thing, but all of the above.

I've always been quite careful about what I wanted to do. I've just never wanted to revisit old ground or do something that's easy. I want to do something that I would look at and go, "I don't know what to do!" The most exciting thing is when you're a bit scared, so I'm looking to find something that's really terrifying.

One might say science is the sum total of our knowledge of the universe, the great library of the known, but the practice of science happens at the border between the known and the unknown. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we peer into the darkness with eyes opened not in fear but in wonder.

I guess we’ll be traveling in uncharted waters.” “That’ll be fun,” Phil said.

It's way easier to stay in the comfort zone, especially when things are going good than to go out on a limb and take some risks. My philosophy is exactly the opposite: Sometimes it's risky not to take a risk.

Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon.

What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.

[...] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands.

The problem [with genetic research] is, we're just starting down this path, feeling our way in the dark. We have a small lantern in the form of a gene, but the lantern doesn't penetrate more than a couple of hundred feet. We don't know whether we're going to encounter chasms, rock walls or mountain ranges along the way. We don't even know how long the path is.

That's, of course, the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

Without risk, there can be no growth.

I was dimly aware that I might be getting in over my head. But that only added to the scheme’s appeal. That it wouldn’t be easy was the whole point.

In my sentences I go where no man has gone before.

Oh, how much is today hidden by science! Oh, how much it is expected to hide!