David Berlinski Quotes

God is simple, everything else is complex

The monad, of which we shall speak here, is nothing but a simple substance which enters into compounds; simple, that is to say, without parts.

The gods, my dear simple fellow, are a mere expression coined by vulgar superstition. We frown upon such coinage here.

I don't think God is an explanation at all. It's simply redescribing the problem. We are trying to understand how we have got a complicated world, and we have an explanation in terms of a slightly simpler world, and we explain that in terms of a slightly simpler world and it all hangs together down to an ultimately simple world. Now, God is not an explanation of that kind. God himself cannot be simple if he has power to do all the things he is supposed to do.

Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever?

Yes, if the life and death of Socrates are those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus are those of a god.

You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

As far as I know, Clifford Pickover is the first mathematician to write a book about areas where math and theology overlap. Are there mathematical proofs of God? Who are the great mathematicians who believed in a deity? Does numerology lead anywhere when applied to sacred literature? Pickover covers these and many other off-trail topics with his usual verve, humor, and clarity. And along the way the reader will learn a great deal of serious mathematics.

Because the Soul is not made of matter, since it is spiritual, it cannot obey the laws of matter, it cannot be judged by the laws of matter.

Its more than a simple belief that there is good and that it should fight the evil in the world. It's a personification of Light and Darkness at their most elemental level, as forces that are so absorbed with themselves that one cannot exist without the other though they constantly try to consume one another. One of the earliest repersentations of Light and Darkness was of Light being a massive black bull and Darkness being an enormous white bull.

'I believe in o­ne God and Mohammed the Apostle of God,' is the simple and invariable profession of Islam. The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the honours of the prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtue, and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion.

When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.

No religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.

Nothing is a thing: it's nothing. So I can imagine a place where there's not even nothing.

The main feature should be the teaching of principles through stories. Don't make it metaphysical at all.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.

There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.

The mathematical phenomenon always develops out of simple arithmetic, so useful in everyday life, out of numbers, those weapons of the gods: the gods are there, behind the wall, at play with numbers.

Many people fear the words Lord and God.

Success! to thee, as to a God, men bend the knee.

Abundance is not a number or acquisition. It is the simple recognition of enoughness.