Truth is what stands the test of experience.

Albert Einstein

The real meaning of the Dharma . . . must be directly experienced.

Siddha Nagarjuna

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Let us get down to bedrock facts. The beginning of every act of knowing, and therefore the starting-point of every science, must be in our own personal experience.

Max Planck

Personal experience is . . . the foundation of Buddhist philosophy. In this sense Buddhism is radical empiricism or experimentalism.

D. T. Suzuki

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The common root from which scientific and all other knowledge must arise . . . is the content of my consciousness.

Sir Arthur Eddington

The Truth itself . . . can only be self-realized within one’s own deepest consciousness.

Buddha

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Science . . . is based on personal experience, or on the experience of others, reliably reported.

Werner Heisenberg

From the lips of your teacher you have learned of the truth of Brahman as it is revealed in the scriptures. Now you must realize that truth directly and immediately. Then only will your heart be free from any doubt.

Shankara

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Experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. In other words we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.

Richard P. Feynman

In our world error is continually the handmaid and pathfinder of Truth; for error is really a half-truth that stumbles because of its limitations; often it is Truth that wears a disguise in order to arrive unobserved near to its goal.

Sri Aurobindo

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It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.

Sir Arthur Eddington

The external world is only a manifestation of the activities of the mind itself, and . . . the mind grasps it as an external world simply because of its habit of discrimination and false-reasoning. The disciple must get into the habit of looking at things truthfully.

Buddha

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We should not let everything else atrophy in favor of the one organ of rational analysis. . . . It is a matter, rather, of seizing upon reality with all the organs that are given to us, and trusting that this reality will then also reflect the essence of things, the “one, the good and the true.”

Werner Heisenberg

Transcendental intelligence rises when the intellectual mind reaches its limit and if things are to be realized in their true and essential nature, its processes of thinking must be transcended by an appeal to some higher faculty of cognition.

Buddha

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We can only reason from data and the ultimate data must be given to us by a non-reasoning process — a self-knowledge of that which is in our consciousness.

Sir Arthur Eddington

Emptiness is the result of an intuition and not the outcome of reasoning. . . . It is the Praja that sees into all the implications of Emptiness, and not the intellect.

D. T. Suzuki

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[From Einstein and Buddha: the parallel sayings, Editor Thomas J. McFarlane]