"All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical mathematics of the city of heaven." (Sir Thomas Browne, "The Garden of Cyrus", 1658)
"Although we gladly acknowledge Nature's mysterious encheiresis, her faculty of creating and furthering life, and, without being mystics, admit the existence of ultimate limits to our explorations, we are nevertheless convinced that man, if he is serious about it, cannot desist from the attempt to keep encroaching upon the region of the unexplorable. In the end, of course, he has to give up and willingly concede his defeat." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1832)
"Mysticism is the realisation of God, of the Universal Self. It is attained either as a realisation of God outside the Mystic, or within himself. In the first case, it is usually reached from within a religion, by exceptionally intense love and devotion, accompanied by purity of life, for only the pure in heart shall see God." (Annie Besant, "The Basis of Morality", 1915)
"The true Mystic, realising God, has no need of any Scriptures, for he has touched the source whence all Scriptures flow." (Annie Besant, "The Basis of Morality", 1915)
"We are constantly hatching an enormous number of false ideas, conceits, Utopias, mystical explanations, suspicions, and megalomaniacal fantasies, which disappear when brought into contact with other people." (Jean Piaget, "Le jugement et le raisonnement chez l'enfant" ["Judgment and Reasoning in the Child"], 1924)
"Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold. Such a Nature does not accept abdication, nor skepticism." (Albert Claude, [Nobel lecture] 1974)
"Whenever the Eastern mystics express their knowledge in words - be it with the help of myths, symbols, poetic images or paradoxical statements-they are well aware of the limitations imposed by language and 'linear' thinking. Modern physics has come to take exactly the same attitude with regard to its verbal models and theories. They, too, are only approximate and necessarily inaccurate. They are the counterparts of the Eastern myths, symbols and poetic images, and it is at this level that I shall draw the parallels. The same idea about matter is conveyed, for example, to the Hindu by the cosmic dance of the god Shiva as to the physicist by certain aspects of quantum field theory. Both the dancing god and the physical theory are creations of the mind: models to describe their authors' intuition of reality." (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism", 1975)
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