“We now know too much about matter to be materialists.”

—  Arthur James Balfour

Theism and humanism
Context: We now know too much about matter to be materialists. The very essence of the physical order of things is that it creates nothing new. Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes. But sensibility belongs to the world of consciousness, not to the world of matter.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update July 26, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We now know too much about matter to be materialists." by Arthur James Balfour?
Arthur James Balfour photo
Arthur James Balfour 48
British Conservative politician and statesman 1848–1930

Related quotes

Robert Musil photo

“We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942) Austrian writer

Wir haben nicht zuviel Verstand und zu wenig Seele, sondern wir haben zu wenig Verstand in den Fragen der Seele.
Helpless Europe (1922)

Ludwig Feuerbach photo

“We have busied ourselves and contented ourselves long enough with speaking and writing; now at last we demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter; we are as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism; we are determined to become political materialists.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture I, Occasion and Context
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Sue Monk Kidd photo

“You know, some things don't matter that much… Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart - now, matters.”

Sue Monk Kidd book The Secret Life of Bees

Source: The Secret Life of Bees

Michael Richards photo

“Whats the matter, too much for you to handle?”

Michael Richards (1949) American actor

Laugh Factory incident (2006)

William Crookes photo

“It is equally difficult, hemmed in and bound round as we are by materialistic ideas, to think of intelligence, thought, and will existing without form or matter and untrammeled by gravitation or space.”

William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist

Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: Popular imagination presupposes spiritual beings to be utterly independent of gravitation, while retaining shapes and proportions which gravitation originally determined, and only gravitation seems likely to maintain.
When and if spiritual beings make themselves visible either to our bodily eyes or to our inward vision, their object would be thwarted were they not to appear in a recognizable form; so that their appearance would take the shape of the body and clothing to which we have been accustomed. Materiality, form, and space, I am constrained to believe, are temporary conditions of our present existence. It is difficult to conceive the idea of a spiritual being having a body like ours, conditioned by the exact gravitating force exerted by the earth, and with organs which presuppose the need for food and necessity for the removal of waste products. It is equally difficult, hemmed in and bound round as we are by materialistic ideas, to think of intelligence, thought, and will existing without form or matter and untrammeled by gravitation or space.

Dan Brown photo

“Dante's poem, Langdon was now reminded, was not so much about the misery of hell as it was about the power of the human spirit to endure any challenge, no matter how daunting.”

Dan Brown book Inferno

Source: Inferno

“It doesn't matter what we believe about God. It's what He knows about us.”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

London: Coronet Books, 1984, p. 316
The speaker is an eighty-year-old Mother Superior explaining why she allowed the burial in the convent cemetery of a foreign woman, a collaborator in a charitable enterprise, who was an unbeliever.
The World Is Made of Glass (1983)

Baba Hari Dass photo

“No matter how much we talk about universal unity, we end up making another group”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

The Path to Enlightenment is not a Highway, 1996
Context: Making separate groups is human nature. No matter how much we talk about universal unity, we end up making another group. (p. 18)

Harper Lee photo

“I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy—it’s a matter of balance.”

Harper Lee book Go Set a Watchman

Source: Go Set a Watchman

China Miéville photo

“Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now.”

China Miéville (1972) English writer

interview with Joan Gordon
Context: Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk.

Related topics