Johannes Kepler Quotes

Free will is to mind, what chance is to matter

Now, the causes being four, it is the business of the student of nature to know about them all, and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the "why" in the way proper to his science-the matter, the form, the mover, that for the sake of which.

Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, and what mind is to matter.

In the works of Nature, purpose, not accident, is the main thing.

I would say that teleology is theology, and that God is not a "because," but rather an "in order to.

Nothing in this world happens by chance

No acts are random or wasted.

The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of casuality[sic], color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world.

There is no matter as such—mind is the matrix of all matter.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.

The wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it.

Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.

The smallest thing in its rightful place can lead to the highest goals.

Keep this in mind: there are no coincidences.

If there are a bunch of fruit trees, one can say that whoever created these fruit trees wanted some apples. In other words, by looking at the order in the world, we can infer purpose and from purpose we begin to get some knowledge of the Creator, the Planner of all this. This is, then, how I look at God. I look at God through the works of God's hands and from those works imply intentions. From these intentions, I receive an impression of the Almighty.

You lose nothing when fighting for a cause ... In my mind the losers are those who don't have a cause they care about.

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

Sometimes we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.

Among the facts of the universe to be accounted for, it may be said, is Mind; and it is self evident that nothing can have produced Mind but Mind.

The atomists , unlike Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle , sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause.

Although you can find certain differences among the Buddhist philosophical schools about how the universe came into being, the basic common question addressed is how the two fundamental principles-external matter and internal mind or consciousness-although distinct, affect one another. External causes and conditions are responsible for certain of our experiences of happiness and suffering. Yet we find that it is principally our own feelings, our thoughts and our emotions, that really determine whether we are going to suffer or be happy.

The Purpose of Time is to Prevent Everything from Happening at Once

Death focuses the mind on the things that really matter: why are we here, and what should we do?

But this mind isn't somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can't move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It's the mind that moves.