Mark Hanley

“I have shown you this evening autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar in fact that you cannot tell one apart from the other. Among such phenomena, how can we draw a line of demarcation and say, here the physical ends and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist.
It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self made records, and perceived in them one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things - the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us - it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: "They who see but one, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth - unto none else, unto none else!”
― Jagadis Chandra Bose, Response in the Living and Non-Living

“Every man has within him his own Pathmos. He is free to venture, or not to venture, upon that terrifying promontory of thought from which one can see into the shadows. If he refrains from doing so, he continues to live an ordinary life, with ordinary thoughts, ordinary virtues, ordinary beliefs and ordinary doubts – and it is well that he should. It is clearly best for his internal peace of mind. For if he ventures on to this summit, he is lost. He will have glimpsed the mighty waves of the Marvelous – and no one can look upon that ocean with impunity… He persists in contemplating this alluring abyss, in exploring the unexplored, in remaining detached from life on the Earth, and in his efforts to penetrate a forbidden world, to touch the untouchable, to gaze on the invisible he returns again and again to the edge of the precipice, leans over, takes one step down and then another – and that is how one penetrates the impenetrable and loses oneself in a limitless extension of infinity.”
― Victor Hugo

“the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.”
― Voltaire

“Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.”
― Alan Barth