Non Fiction Authors

"Patanjali was a compiler of teaching which, up to the time of his advent, had been given orally for many centuries... The Yoga Sutras are the basic teaching of the Trans Himalayan School to which many of the Masters of the Wisdom belong, and many students hold that the Essenes and other schools of mystical training and thought, closely connected with the founder of Christianity and the early Christians, are based upon the same system... the Sutras have been dictated and paraphrased by the Tibetan Brother and the commentary upon them has been written by myself, and subjected to revision and comment by the Tibetan."

"When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be."

"When a man becomes steadfast in his abstention from harming others, then all living creatures will cease to feel enmity in his presence"

"When a gifted team dedicates itself to unselfish trust and combines instinct with boldness and effort, it is ready to climb."

"Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations."

"We must never make experiments to confirm our ideas, but simply to control them."

"Man can learn nothing unless he proceeds from the known to the unknown."

"A modern poet has characterized the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I: Science is We."

"If I had to define life in a word, it would be: Life is creation."

"Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride."

"True science teaches us to doubt and to abstain from ignorance."

"Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and sole happiness.… [A] man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science."

"Our language, in fact, is only approximate, and even in science it is so indefinite that if we lose sight of phenomena and cling to words, we are speedily outside of reality.… [W]e must always cling to phenomena and see in words only expressions empty of meaning, if the phenomena they represent are not definite, or if they are absent."

"[T]heories are only hypotheses, verified by more or less numerous facts. Those verified by the most facts are the best; but even then they are never final, never to be absolutely believed."

"When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted."

"A great surgeon performs operations for stone by a single method; later he makes a statistical summary of deaths and recoveries, and he concludes from these statistics that the mortality law for this operation is two out of five. Well, I say that this ratio means literally nothing scientifically and gives us no certainty in performing the next operation; for we do not know whether the next case will be among the recoveries or the deaths. What really should be done, instead of gathering facts empirically, is to study them more accurately, each in its special determinism. We must study cases of death with great care and try to discover in them the cause of mortal accidents so as to master the cause and avoid the accidents."

"[P]articular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science."

"[S]cience, in humbling our pride, proportionately increases our power."

"[A] living organism is nothing but a wonderful machine."

"Indeed, proof that a given condition always precedes or accompanies a phenomenon does not warrant concluding with certainty that a given condition is the immediate cause of that phenomenon. It must still be established that, when this condition is removed, the phenomenon will no longer appear."

"[I]t is important to determine at what point to apply doubt, so as to distinguish it from scepticism, and to show how scientific doubt becomes an element of the greatest certainty. The sceptic disbelieves in science and believes in himself; he believes enough in himself to dare deny science and to assert that it is not subject to definite, fixed laws. The doubter is a true man of science; he doubts only himself and his interpretations, but he believes in science; in the experimental sciences, he even accepts a criterion of absolute scientific principle."

"A contemporary poet has characterized this sense of the personality of art and of the impersonality of science in these words,—"Art is myself, science is ourselves.""

"[T]he experimental method draws from within itself an impersonal authority which dominates science. It forces this authority even on great men.[…] Every period has its own sum total of errors and of truths. Certain mistakes are, in a sense, inherent in their period, so that only the subsequent progress of science can reveal them.… [T]he further science advances, the more it takes an impersonal form and detaches itself from the past."

"[T]hey make poor observations, because they choose among the results of their experiments only what suits their object, neglecting whatever is unrelated to it, and carefully setting aside everything which might tend toward the idea they wish to combat."

"In sciences of observation, man observes and reasons experimentally, but he does not experiment; and in this sense we might say that a science of observation is a passive science. In sciences of experimentation, man observes, but in addition he acts on matter, analyzes its properties and to his own advantage brings about the appearance of phenomena which doubtless always occur according to natural laws, but in conditions which nature often has not yet achieved. With the help of these active experimental sciences, man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation: and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress in the experimental sciences."

"[T]he science of life […] is a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen."

"Considered in itself, the experimental method is nothing but reasoning by whose help we methodically submit our ideas to experience,—the experience of facts."

"The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion."

"All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment."

"The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them."

"Science admits no exceptions; otherwise there would be no determinism in science, or rather, there would be no science."

"Science does not permit exceptions."

"Braudel was not a Hindu chauvinist, just a scholarly observer, but in today’s climate, he would be blacklisted."

"India survived only by virtue of its patience, its superhuman power and its immense size. The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors’ opulence. … The Muslims … could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves."

"Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history."

"For four or five centuries, Islam was the most brilliant civilization in the Old World. ... At its higher level the golden age of Muslim civilization was both an immense scientific success and a exceptional revival of ancient philosophy. These was not its only triumphs; literature was another: but they eclipse the rest. First, science: it was there that the Saracens ... made the most original contributions. These, in brief, were nothing less than trigonometry and algebra (with its significantly Arab name). ... Equally distinguished were Islam's mathematical geographers, its astronomical observatories and instruments ... [.] The Muslims also deserve high marks for optics, for chemistry ... and for pharmacy. More than half the remedies and healing aids used by the West came from Islam ... [.] Muslim medical skill was incontestable. ... In the field of philosophy, what took place was rediscovery - a return, essentially of the peripatetic philosophy. The scope of this rediscovery, however, was not limited to copying and handling on, valuable as that undoubtely was. It also involved continuing, elucidating and creating."

"[T]he entire course of French history since then has been influenced by something that happened in the eighteenth century” and asks “did France cease to be a great power not, as is usually thought, on 15 June 1815 on the field of Waterloo, but well before that, during the reign of Louis XV when the natural birth-rate was interrupted?"

"Der Umgang mit Kindern hat für einen verständigen Menschen unendlich viel Interesse. Hier sieht er das Buch der Natur in unverfälschter Ausgabe aufgeschlagen."

"Sei nicht zu sehr ein Sklave der Meinungen andrer von dir! Sei selbständig! Was kümmert dich am Ende das Urteil der ganzen Welt, wenn du tust, was du sollst?"

"Lerne Widerspruch ertragen. Sei nicht kindisch eingenommen von deinen Meinungen."

"Lerne den Ton der Gesellschaft anzunehmen, in der du dich befindest."

"Keine Verbindungen pflegen dauerhafter zu sein als die, welche in der frühen Jugend geschlossen werden. Man ist da noch weniger misstrauisch, weniger schwierig in Kleinigkeiten."

"In deiner Kleidung verfalle nie in Nachlässigkeit, wenn du allein bist. Gehe nicht schmutzig, nicht krumm noch mit groben Manieren einher, wenn dich niemand beobachtet."

"Gar zu leicht missbrauchen oder vernachlässigen uns die Menschen, sobald wir mit ihnen vertraulich werden. Um angenehm zu leben, muss man fast immer ein Fremder unter den Leuten bleiben."

"Es gibt keine Notlügen; noch nie ist eine Unwahrheit gesprochen worden, die nicht früh oder spät nachteillige Folgen für jedermann gehabt hätte."

"Handle gut und anständig, weniger anderen zu gefallen, eher um deine eigene Achtung nicht zu verscherzen."

"Achte dich selbst, wenn du willst, dass andere dich achten sollen!"

"Ohne Begeisterung, welche die Seele mit einer gesunden Wärme erfüllt, wird nie etwas Großes zustande gebracht."

"In Städten glaubt man, es gehöre zum guten Tone, nicht einmal zu wissen, wer in demselben Hause wohnt."

"Wir sehen die klügsten, verständigsten Menschen im Leben Schritte tun, über die wir den Kopf schütteln müssen."