Quotes from Rupert Sheldrake

cosmologists have come to the conclusion that known kinds of matter and energy constitute only about 4 per cent of the universe. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy. The nature of 96 per cent of physical reality is literally obscure.8

the very word for matter is derived from the same root as mother-in Latin, the corresponding words are materia and matet-and (as discussed in Chapter 3), the whole ethos of materialism is permeated with maternal metaphors.

But the cosmonaut Aleksandr Aleksandrov summed up the principal message for millions of people. Looking down on America and then in Russia, he saw the first snow and imagined people in both countries getting ready for winter. "And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you look at. We are all Earth's children, and we should treat her as our Mother.

In ancient Rome, money was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Great Mother in her aspect of adviser and admonisher. She is the source of our words money and monetary.

The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.

Mathematically, morphogenetic fields can be modified in terms of attractors within basins of attraction.

All creation or destruction of forms, or morphogenesis, can be described by the disappearance of the attractors representing the initial forms, and their replacement by capture by the attractors representing the final forms.

Machines are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

I think hard work is what gets most people to the top.

In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.

Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.

There's a certain kind of scepticism that can't bear uncertainty.

I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism.

I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science.

Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.

Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It's a system of education entirely for the middle aged.