Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 11
Debate with Bill Ayers on The Kelly File (Fox News, 2 July 2014) ( video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfVUktKzPSA)
“Being able to embrace contradictions is a sign of intelligence.
Or insanity.”
Source: Butcher Bird
Bodhi Tree lecture (1999)
Context: The Goddess religion asserts that the earth is alive, and that everything on the earth is part of a living being. We believe that you can celebrate life in many different images and forms, that life moves in cycles of birth and growth and death and rebirth, and that the same spirit moves through nature, through the cycles of the seasons, through the birth and growth and death of plants and animals, and through our lives as human beings. There is a multiplicity of images that you can draw upon for understanding and power, but the reason we focus on the goddess is partly to counterbalance the 5,000 years worth of focus on male holy images, and partly to affirm that bringing life into the world is sacred. Our goal is not to get out of the world or to get out of life, but to integrate it, to celebrate it, to embrace it fully, and to embrace all the different cycles within it
“Implementing a compassionate perspective that embraces all life is at the heart of being vegan.”
Source: Being Vegan (2000), p. 52
“One may say "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."”
From the article "Physics and Reality" (March 1936), reprinted in Out of My Later Years (1956). The quotation marks may just indicate that he wants to present this as a new aphorism, but it could possibly indicate that he is paraphrasing or quoting someone else — perhaps Immanuel Kant, since in the next sentence he says "It is one of the great realizations of Immanuel Kant that the setting up of a real external world would be senseless without this comprehensibility."
Other variants:
The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.
In the endnotes to Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, note 46 on p. 628 http://books.google.com/books?id=cdxWNE7NY6QC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA628#v=onepage&q&f=false says that "Gerald Holton says that this is more properly translated" as the variant above, citing Holton's essay "What Precisely is Thinking?" on p. 161 of Einstein: A Centenary Volume edited by Anthony Philip French.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
This version was given in Einstein: A Biography (1954) by Antonina Vallentin, p. 24, and widely quoted afterwards. Vallentin cites "Physics and Reality" in Journal of the Franklin Institute (March 1936), and is possibly giving a variant translation as with Holton.
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.
As quoted in Speaking of Science (2000) by Michael Fripp
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.
As quoted in Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, p. 462 http://books.google.com/books?id=cdxWNE7NY6QC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA462#v=onepage&q&f=false. In the original essay "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle" appears at the end of the paragraph that follows the paragraph in which "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility" appears.
1930s
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 393.
The Ocean of Theosophy by William Q. Judge (1893), Chapter 11, Karma
