29 Quotes by Leonard Shlain

He was like a man who awoke too early in the darkness while everyone else was still asleep. – Dmitry Merezhkovsky.

It is the bane and the balm of individual perception that ‘objective’ reality is seen through the filter of each person’s temperament.

On ignorance depends karma; on karma depends consciousness; on consciousness depend name and form; on name and form depend the five organs of sense; on the five organs of sense depends contact; on contact depends sensation; on sensation depends desire; on desire depends clutching; on clutching depends existence; on existence depends birth; on birth depend old age and death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief and despair. – The Buddha’s twelvefold concatenation of cause and effect.

We’re witnessing the end of a 5,000 year reign of patriarchy, and are coming into a society created by our technology that will be more balanced and more feminine. It’s already happening. And I think that the good news is that it’s coming just in time.

A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities.

This dichotomy between the spirits of Apollo and Dionysus suggests that the Greeks allegorically understood the different functions between the right and left brain.

Visionaries are those in the field of art and science who recognize novel patterns. They see beauty before the rest of us do.

How could a slight, five-foot-tall, two-legged animal create such sublimity and yet wreak so much havoc in so minuscule an interval of earth’s history?

The intense effort to develop artificial intelligence has increased our understanding of neural networks because at its core, AI is but an attempt to improve artificially what the brain already does effortlessly.