“It was God who breathed life into matter and inspired its many textures and processes. …Rather than turn away from what he could not explain, he plunged in more deeply. …There were forces in nature that he would not be able to understand mechanically, in terms of colliding billiard balls or swirling vortices. They were vital, vegetable, sexual forces—invisible forces of spirit and attraction. Later, it had been Newton, more than any other philosopher, who effectively purged science of the need to resort to such mystical qualities. For now, he needed them.”

pg 28
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "The Reactionary Nature of the Socialist Conception"

The Scandal of Quantum Mechanics (2008)

Source: The Great Hunt

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XVII: "Fine Body of Men"

In his letter to Theo, The Hague, 11 March 1883, http://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/12/274.htm?qp=art.material,as translated by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, edited by Robert Harrison, in The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh (1991)
1880s, 1883
Context: It constantly remains a source of disappointment to me that my drawings are not yet what I want them to be. The difficulties are indeed numerous and great, and cannot be overcome at once. To make progress is a kind of miner’s work; it doesn’t advance as quickly as one would like, and as others also expect, but as one stands before such a task, the basic necessities are patience and faithfulness. In fact, I do not think much about the difficulties, because if one thought of them too much one would get stunned or disturbed.
A weaver who has to direct and to interweave a great many little threads has no time to philosophize about it, but rather he is so absorbed in his work that he doesn’t think but acts, and he feels how things must go more than he can explain it. Even though neither you nor I, in talking together, would come to any definite plans, etc., perhaps we might mutually strengthen that feeling that something is ripening within us. And that is what I should like.

Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 81 as interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

Misery (1987)

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: Far be it from us not to recognize the importance of the second factor, moral teaching — especially that which is unconsciously transmitted in society and results from the whole of the ideas and comments emitted by each of us on facts and events of every-day life. But this force can only act on society under one condition, that of not being crossed by a mass of contradictory immoral teachings resulting from the practice of institutions.
In that case its influence is nil or baneful. Take Christian morality: what other teaching could have had more hold on minds than that spoken in the name of a crucified God, and could have acted with all its mystical force, all its poetry of martyrdom, its grandeur in forgiving executioners? And yet the institution was more powerful than the religion: soon Christianity — a revolt against imperial Rome — was conquered by that same Rome; it accepted its maxims, customs, and language. The Christian church accepted the Roman law as its own, and as such — allied to the State — it became in history the most furious enemy of all semi-communist institutions, to which Christianity appealed at Its origin.