Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations

Werner Heisenberg

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”

Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr on science and spirituality:

Music at Night and Other Essays

Aldous Huxley

“The universe throws down a challenge to the human spirit… We have a right to our moods of sober exultation.”

Aldous Huxley on how the Moon illuminates the complementarity of science and spirituality – immensely poetic read from 1931:

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World

Lisa Randall

“The universe is humbling. Nature hides many of its most interesting mysteries.”

Cosmologist and particle physicist Lisa Randall on the sublime and the essential differences in how art, science, and religion make sense of the universe – wonderfully mind-expanding read:

A Short History of Myth

Karen Armstrong

“Human beings have always been mythmakers… We are meaning-seeking creatures.”

Why the sky enchants us — fascinating read on the power of myth and our longing for transcendence:

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Helix Books)

Richard P. Feynman

“The size of the universe is very impressive, with us on a tiny particle whirling around the sun, among a hundred thousand million suns in this galaxy, itself among a billion galaxies… Man is a latecomer in a vast evolving drama; can the rest be but a scaffolding for his creation?”

Richard Feynman on the eternal friction between science and religion:

The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Elizabeth Gaskell

Charlotte Brontë on faith and atheism:

A Graphic Cosmogony

Some of today’s most exciting illustrators and graphic artists imagine the origin of the universe and how our world came to be:

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Karen Armstrong

“Compassion… asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

Spectacular and urgently important read on religion, secular morality, and what compassion really means:

Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

Krista Tippett

“How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at… Science and religion… ask different kinds of questions altogether, probing and illuminating in ways neither could alone.”

Einstein’s God – mind-bending, soul-stretching read on free will, science, and spirituality:

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Sam Harris

“Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”

Sam Harris on spirituality without religion and how to cultivate the art of presence as our greatest gateway to happiness – spectacular read:

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor

“For me a dogma is only a gateway to contemplation and is an instrument of freedom and not of restriction.”

Flannery O’Connor on dogma, belief, and the difference between religion and faith – beautiful read, especially for those of us uneasy with the word “God”:

William Blake’s Breathtaking Drawings for Dante’s Divine Comedy, Over Which He Labored Until His Dying Day

William Blake

The sinister and sublime, reconciled in transcendent watercolors.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

Carl Sagan

“If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.”

Carl Sagan on science and “God,” a timeless must-read:

Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers

“Everything is naturally related and interconnected.”

Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, on science and religion: