Paul Carus Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

The deva asked,
What causes ruin in the world?
What breaks off friendships?
What is the most violent fever?
Who is the best physician?

The Blessed One replied,
Ruin in the world is caused by ignorance;
friendships are broken off by envy and selfishness;
the most violent fever is hatred;
the best physician is the Buddha.

Paul Carus
We must only learn that independence cannot be gained by a rebellion against the constitution of the universe, or by inverting the laws of life and evolution, but by comprehending them and adapting ourselves to the world in which we live.

Paul Carus
No one saves us but ourselves,
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path
Buddhas merely teach the way.
By ourselves is evil done,
By ourselves we pain endure,
By ourselves we cease from wrong,
By ourselves become we pure.

Paul Carus
Every rebellion which is not in its own nature self-destructive, is an expression of the divine spirit.

Paul Carus
There is no prophet which preaches the superpersonal God more plainly than mathematics.

Paul Carus
Pythagoras says that number is the origin of all things, and certainly the law of number is the key that unlocks the secrets of the universe. But the law of number possesses an immanent order, which is at first sight mystifying, but on a more intimate acquaintance we easily understand it to be intrinsically necessary; and this law of number explains the wondrous consistency of the laws of nature.

Paul Carus
Science is not the monopoly of the naturalist or the scholar, nor is it anything mysterious or esoteric. Science is the search for truth, and truth is the adequacy of a description of facts.

Paul Carus
The field of science, however, is large, for it is nothing less than the whole world, the infinite universe in which we live; and the experiences which we make by studying the various phenomena of our surroundings are illimitable and inexhaustible.

Paul Carus
There is no science which teaches the harmonies of nature more clearly than mathematics.

Paul Carus
Infinity is the land of mathematical hocus pocus. There Zero the magician is king. When Zero divides any number he changes it without regard to its magnitude into the infinitely small [great?], and inversely, when divided by any number he begets the infinitely great [small?]. In this domain the circumference of the circle becomes a straight line, and then the circle can be squared. Here all ranks are abolished, for Zero reduces everything to the same level one way or another. Happy is the kingdom where Zero rules!

Paul Carus
Mankind has become more and more convinced of the efficiency of science, and in this sense the philosophy of science prevails even now as a still latent but nevertheless potent factor in the life of mankind, manifesting itself in innumerable subconscious tendencies of the age.

Paul Carus
Science is originally one and undivided and serves the practical purpose of guidance in life. When by a division of labor the several sciences originated, there remained a field which was common to all of them; and this field is the domain of the science of the sciences, i.e., of philosophy.

Paul Carus
The truth is that other systems of geometry are possible, yet after all, these other systems are not spaces but other methods of space measurements. There is one space only, though we may conceive of many different manifolds, which are contrivances or ideal constructions invented for the purpose of determining space.

Paul Carus
Every success of scientific inquiry, every progress of research in the several fields of knowledge, every new invention based upon methodical experiment is a refutation of agnosticism - the philosophy of nescience - in so far as these several advances corroborate the reliability of science.

Paul Carus