Excerpted from Einstein and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings by Thomas McFarlane with permission of Ulysses Press.

A mathematical truth is timeless, it does not come into being when we discover it. Yet its discovery is a very real event.
Erwin Schrödinger

Realization is nothing to be gained afresh; it is already there. All that is necessary is to get rid of the thought `I have not realized'.
Sri Ramana Maharshi



If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must say "no"; if we ask whether the position of the electron changes with time, we must say "no"; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must say "no"; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say "no."
J. Robert Oppenheimer

He is far and he is near,
He moves and he moves not.
The Bhagavad Gita



It is a primitive form of thought that things either exist or do not exist.
Sir Arthur Eddington

To say "it is" is to grasp for permanence. To say "it is not" is to adopt the view of nihilism. Therefore a wise person does not say "exists" or "does not exist."

Siddha Nagarjuna The smallest units of matter are in fact not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms.
Werner Heisenberg

All things-from Brahma the creator down to a single blade of grass-are the apparently diverse names and forms of the one Atman.
Shankara



There is no essential distinction between mass and energy. Energy has mass and mass represents energy. Instead of two conservation laws we have only one, that of mass-energy.
Albert Einstein

...Only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy. Matter expresses itself eventually as a formulation of some unknown Force.
Sri Aurobindo



People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubborn, persistent illusion.
Albert Einstein

The past, the future...are nothing but names, forms of thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities.
T. R. V. Murti

The common words "space" and "time" refer to a structure of space and time that is actually an idealization and oversimplification.
Werner Heisenberg

There is nothing like an absolute time which remains as a reality apart from successive events. Time and space are derived notions, modes of reference.

K. Venkata Ramanan



What we perceive through the senses as empty space...is the ground for the existence of everything, including ourselves. The things that appear to our senses are derivative forms and their true meaning can be seen only when we consider the plenum, in which they are generated and sustained, and into which they must ultimately vanish.
David Bohm

Wherefrom do all these worlds come? They come from space. All beings arise from space, and into space they return: space is indeed their beginning, and space is their final end.
The Upanishads



Causality may be considered as a mode of perception by which we reduce our sense impressions to order.
Niels Bohr

Time, space, and causation are like the glass through which the Absolute is seen.... In the Absolute there is neither time, space, nor causation.
Vivekananda



A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended is its area of applicability.
Albert Einstein

As in science, so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole.
Sri Aurobindo