Varadaraja V. Raman

“Bookish academics need to remember that when it comes to analyzing works regarded as sacred by vast numbers of people, sound scholarship is like the firmness of bones, while appreciation and sensitivity are like flesh and blood. Without the latter, the former is merely an ugly skeleton: morbid and monstrous, lifeless and lamentable. With the latter, scholarship becomes robust and living.”

“science and religion are intrinsically interconnected both being expressions of the human spirit.”

“the technical work of scientists is blind to nationalities, they overlap and mingle like sounds from different instruments in an orchestra to create and constitute the grand symphony that science is.”

“condemning religions as a whole would be like wanting to destroy a garden because weeds have disfigured it.”

“When one is involved in the discovery and discernment of the marvelous law and symmetries that shape the phenomenal world, one cannot but be struck by the silent and unfathomable intelligence that seems to pervade the Cosmos.”

“What debaters in ivory towers often fail to realize is that when it comes to achieving well-defined goals, both theism and atheism can work.”

“The fact is, when we are born, we are neither theists nor atheists, but ignoro-theists.”

“We are creatures, not only of the mind, but of feelings and emotions as well. Indeed, feelings and emotions are more fundamental to our being than pure logic and reasoning.”

“Religions are like lofty peaks rising high above the surrounding plains of our physical being, merging, as it were, into the distant domain of heaven itself, beckoning the human spirit with grandeur.”

“The spiritual quest is the expression of the deepest longing to connect with the Whole.”

“The person of faith, in ritual or worship, while reciting a prayer, singing a psalm, and invoking a mantra, feels deep within a communion that, like the philosopher’s stone of alchemy, transforms the lead and copper of animal existence into the silver and gold of divine delight.”

“The religious approach to spirituality is like delighting in a gourmet meal; the scientific approach is like studying recipes or chemically analyzing the ingredients of the menu.”

“Of all the wondrous elements in our vast and complex universe, there is perhaps nothing more intriguing, than consciousness.”

“If we do not wonder about origins and ends at least once during life’s journey, we are but biochemical blobs that devour matter and energy for a time-span, sport and make noise, and then go into eternal extinction.”

“Mysteries, to most scientists, are meta-stable states of non-understanding, often like darkness before dawn. Like the morning dew, they evaporate away by the light of new knowledge, causing an euphoric eureka.”

“all the light and beauty, all the grandeur and majesty of the universe are unraveled only in the tiny retinas of human beings.”

“The aesthetic dimensions of science, like that of great classical music, are evident to the aficionado.”

“It has been said that science is proof without certainty, where as religion is certainty without proof.”

“If a and b yield C, but C is not equal to a+b, then we have emergence.”