Top 40 Rupert Sheldrake Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Science at its best is an open-minded method of inquiry, not a belief system.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

2. “The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

3. “Strategic thinking requires the ability to contemplate possibilities that are not immediately present.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

4. “Basically, morphic fields are fields of habit, and they’ve been set up through habits of thought, through habits of activity, and through habits of speech. Most of our culture is habitual...”

— Rupert Sheldrake

5. “The universe is not in a steady state; there’s an ongoing creative principle in nature, which is driving things onwards.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

6. “Creativity gives new forms, new patterns, new ideas, new art forms. And we don’t know where creativity comes from. Is it inspired from above? Welling up from below? Picked up from the air? What? Creativity is a mystery wherever you encounter it...”

— Rupert Sheldrake

7. “If there is no randomness in the universe, then what do we mean by chaos?”

— Rupert Sheldrake

8. “The idea is that there is a kind of memory in nature. Each kind of thing has a collective memory. So, take a squirrel living in New York now. That squirrel is being influenced by all past squirrels.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

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9. “The cumulative nature of the evolutionary process, the fact that memory is preserved, means that life grows not just through a random proliferation of new forms, but there’s a kind of cumulative quality...”

— Rupert Sheldrake

10. “What you do, what you say and what you think can influence other people by morphic resonance. There is no immoral filter in morphic resonance, which means that we have to be more careful about what we are thinking if we are concerned about the affect we have on others.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

11. “Bad religion is arrogant, self-righteous, dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists, scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

12. “Matter is merely mind deadened by the development of habit to the point where the breaking up of these habits is very difficult.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

13. “As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.”4.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

14. “All creation or destruction of forms, or morphogenesis, can be described by the disappearance of the attractors representing the initial forms, and their replacement by capture by the attractors representing the final forms.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

15. “Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

16. “Traditional theories of human creativity ascribe it to inspiration from a higher source working through the creative individual, who acts as a channel. The same conception underlies the notion of genius; originally the genius was not the person himself but his presiding god or spirit.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

17. “I think that creativity depends on having sufficient indeterminacy around for a new pattern to arise up within it.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

18. “For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

19. “Mathematically, morphogenetic fields can be modified in terms of attractors within basins of attraction.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

20. “At the moment of insight, a potential pattern of organized behavior comes into being.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

21. “The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

22. “Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

23. “I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14. I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

24. “In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

25. “Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

26. “There’s a certain kind of scepticism that can’t bear uncertainty.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

27. “I still say the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

28. “I am all in favour of science and reason if they are scientific and reasonable. But I am against granting scientists and the materialist worldview an exemption from critical thinking and sceptical investigation. We need an enlightenment of the Enlightenment.17.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

29. “The commonest kinds of seemingly telepathic response are the anticipation by dogs and cats of their owners coming home; the anticipation of owners going away; the anticipation of being fed; cats disappearing when their owners intend to take them to the vet; dogs knowing when their owners are planning to take them for a walk; and animals that get excited when their owner is on the telephone, even before the telephone is answered.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

30. “Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It’s a system of education entirely for the middle aged.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

31. “I think that the ‘laws of nature’ are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

32. “Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

33. “I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

34. “Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It’s not rigidly determined in the old sense. It’s not rigidly predictable.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

35. “When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can’t make sense of it. Then, if it’s around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there’s a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

36. “The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn’t prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

37. “I’m talking about science on the leading edge, where it’s not clear which way things are going be cause we don’t know, and I’m dealing with areas which we don’t know about.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

38. “Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

39. “Machines are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don’t want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

40. “In ancient Rome, money was minted in the temple of Juno Moneta, the Great Mother in her aspect of adviser and admonisher. She is the source of our words money and monetary.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

41. “But the cosmonaut Aleksandr Aleksandrov summed up the principal message for millions of people. Looking down on America and then in Russia, he saw the first snow and imagined people in both countries getting ready for winter. “And then it struck me that we are all children of our Earth. It does not matter what country you look at. We are all Earth’s children, and we should treat her as our Mother.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

42. “To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn’t seem to give a very full picture of the world.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

43. “The sunlike energy released by the fusion of atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, is detonated by the fission of one of the heaviest, plutonium, named after the god of the underworld.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

44. “Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system?”

— Rupert Sheldrake

45. “The sudden appearance of all the Laws of Nature is as untestable as Platonic metaphysics or theology. Why should we assume that all the Laws of Nature were already present at the instant of the Big Bang, like a cosmic Napoleonic code? Perhaps some of them, such as those that govern protein crystals, or brains, came into being when protein crystals or brains first arose. The preexistence of these laws cannot possibly be tested before the emergence of the phenomena they govern.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

46. “We must become aware of the astonishing fact that as a species we are the victims of an instance of traumatic abuse in childhood. As human beings, we once had a symbiotic relationship with the world-girdling intelligence of the planet that was mediated through shamanic plant use. This relationship was disrupted and eventually lost by the progressive climatic drying of the Eurasian and African land masses.”

— Rupert Sheldrake

47. “In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.”

— Rupert Sheldrake