Susan Blackmore Quotes

The chief difficulty which prevents men of science from believing in divine as well as in nature Spirits is their materialism.

From first to last it is a dish of rank materialism cleverly cooked up ... . And why is this done? For no other reason, I am sure, except to make us independent of a Creator.

Materialism and spirituality are two pretty racquets with which charlatans in cap and gown make the same ball fly.

You don't have to be a Christian to recognize that materialism does not match reality. Materialism is not true to universal human experience - what we all know about ourselves.

Do not be surprised if I adore as God what you called humanity, since you talked of humanity as if it was empty of spirit and you think in the flesh according to the flesh.

Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.

The soul is an illusion.

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.

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

Our spirit is the real part of us, the body but its garment. A man would not find peace at the tailor's because his coat comes from there; neither can the spirit obtain true happiness from the earth just because his body belongs to earth.

The Indian idea is that the soul is formless. Whatever is form must break some time or other.

The overwhelming majority of people, including Christians, are materialists. They do not believe in the power of spirit. They believe only in material power.

We must always remember that God is Love. "A fool indeed is he who, living on the banks of the Ganga, seeks to dig a little well for water. A fool indeed is the man who, living near a mine of diamonds, spends his life in searching for beads of glass." God is that mine of diamonds. We are fools indeed to give up God for legends of ghosts or flying hobgoblins. It is a disease, a morbid desire.

My mind is incapable of conceiving such a thing as a soul. I may be in error, and man may have a soul; but I simply do not believe it.

When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

Spirit is matter seen in a stronger light.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

The soul ... is nameless because it is formless. It will neither go to heaven nor [to hell] any more than it will enter this glass.

I'm a strict materialist - but the police are brutal materialists.

Materialism prevails in Europe today. You may pray for the salvation of the modern sceptics, but they do not yield, they want reason.

The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

The Self when it appears behind the universe is called God. The same Self when it appears behind this little universe-the body-is the soul.