Best 395 quotes in «metaphysics quotes» category

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind.

Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries.

Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.

Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.

Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

Physics, beware of metaphysics.

Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.

That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

Religion is the metaphysics of the masses.

About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror. Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics.

Without forgiveness, metaphysics are useless.

476. Children do not learn that books exist, that armchairs exist, etc.,etc. - they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.,etc. Later, questions about the existence of things do of course arise, "Is there such a thing as a unicorn?" and so on. But such a question is possible only because as a rule no corresponding question presents itself. For how does one know how to set about satisfying oneself of the existence of unicorns? How did one learn the method for determining whether something exists or not? 477. "So one must know that the objects whose names one teaches a child by an ostensive definition exist." - Why must one know they do? Isn't it enough that experience doesn't later show the opposite? For why should the language-game rest on some kind of knowledge? 478. Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists? 479. Are we to say that the knowledge that there are physical objects comes very early or very late?

The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.

A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.

All three explanations—eternal life, reincarnation, and nothingness—are descriptions of the same reality.

All's a Oneness. There's nothing else.

Akhenaten Speaks: Ô mighty sun in thou warmth you speaketh an infinite message love, vitality, regeneration I awake with thee then sleep in thouest golden glow

All personal god, yours or mine, are false. Unto existence nothing but an infinite oneness walks.

Although each of us has the right to believe we are suffering, I suppose, there is a definite and ultimately essential distinction to be made between actual suffering, its cause and resolution, and invented or imagined suffering.

A metaphysical understanding of what the world is, how it works, and how it all fits together, in general and abstract terms, could be the most real and important thing there is. In that case, we don't do metaphysics so that we can stay healthy and wealthy: we want to stay healthy and wealthy so that we can do metaphysics.

Anyone who can relax, clear their mind, and envision being different in some way—such as more successful, funny, healthy, wealthy, or wise—can quantum jump. To initiate a quantum jump requires keeping an open mind that you can experience another reality. It is important that you are able to sincerely desire and feel a connection to another reality, envisioning some way of making a connection with it through a bridge, a door, a window or a handshake.

Among the objections to the reality of objects of sense, there is one which is derived from the apparent difference between matter as it appears in physics and things as they appear in sensation. Men of science, for the most part, are willing to condemn immediate data as "merely subjective," while yet maintaining the truth of the physics inferred from those data. But such an attitude, though it may be *capable* of justification, obviously stands in need of it; and the only justification possible must be one which exhibits matter as a logical construction from sense-data―unless, indeed, there were some wholly *a priori* principle by which unknown entities could be inferred from such as are known. It is therefore necessary to find some way of bridging the gulf between the world of physics and the world of sense, and it is this problem which will occupy us in the present lecture. Physicists appear to be unconscious of the gulf, while psychologists, who are conscious of it, have not the mathematical knowledge required for spanning it. The problem is difficult, and I do not know its solution in detail. All that I can hope to do is to make the problem felt, and to indicate the kind of methods by which a solution is to be sought." ―from_Our Knowledge of the External World_, p. 107.

And here I am. God and I, ever One, and Alone.

Angel of Mercy Speaks: Angel of Mercy may your stone flesh awaken with my garland of love so once again your love fills my heart with peace

Any person or thing of significance to you unconsciously plays a role in mirroring your own internal universe, just as you do theirs.

And just as the same town, when looked at from different sides, appears quite different and is, as it were, multiplied in perspective, so also it happens that because of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were as many different universes, which are however but different perspective representations of a single universe form the different point of view of each monad.

Any religion that cannot stand up to a modern scientific reasoning, and to rational proof, is asinine

A painting shouldn't be just a picture, it should be a philosophy.

A quick enlightenment tends to do more harm than good. Wise may easily become unwise.

A professor from UBC observed that he agreed with Alexander Pope about the ultimate unreality of evil. Seen from the highest point of metaphysics. To a rational mind, nothing bad ever really happens. He was talking high-minded balls. Twaddle! I thought. I said, 'Oh? Do you mean that every gas chamber has a silver lining?

...any object functioning within the physical laws of any particular universe does not have free will ... In terms of human beings, all behavior and cognition cannot appear out of thin air. Behavior and cognition must be the result of prior causes. This is because our brains obey the same laws of a cause and effect physical universe just like any other physical object. All events that occur in the universe are caused by antecedent events. Quantum indeterminacy, which maintains that the state of a system does not determine a unique collection of values for all its measurable properties, is not a valid argument for free will and has been used incorrectly to justify beliefs of independent decision-making. Logically speaking, notions of randomness and indeterminism are actually additional arguments against free will. All events that occur at random in the universe are, by definition, not caused by antecedent events. Or to say it a different way, any random event cannot also be a willed event. By the process of elimination, events that are “willed freely” are events that are neither determined nor random. In other words, in all likelihood events that are “willed freely” are events that simply do not exist.

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.

As a method however, the *method of ontology* is nothing but the sequence of the steps involved in the approach to Being as such and the elaboration of its structures. We call this method of ontology *phenomenology*. In more precise language, phenomenological investigation is explicit effort applied to the method of ontology. However, such endeavors, their success or failure, depend primarily, in accordance with our discussion, on how far phenomenology has assured for itself the object of philosophy―how far, in accordance with its own principle, it is unbiased enough in the face of what the things themselves demand. We cannot now enter any further into the essential and fundamental constituent parts of this method. In fact, we have applied it constantly. What we would have to do would be merely to go over the course already pursued, but now with explicit reflection on it. But what is most essential is first of all to have traversed the whole path once, so as, for one thing, to learn to wonder scientifically about the mystery of things and, for another, to banish all illusions, which settle down and nest with particular stubbornness precisely in philosophy. There is no such thing as *the one* phenomenology, and if there could be such a thing it would never become anything like a philosophical technique. For implicit in the essential nature of all genuine method as a path toward the disclosure of objects is the tendency to order itself always toward that which it itself discloses. When a method is genuine and provides access to the objects, it is precisely then that the progress made by following it and the growing originality of the disclosure will cause the very method that was used to become necessarily obsolete. The only thing that is truly new in science and in philosophy is the genuine questioning and struggle with things which is at the service of this questioning." ―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

A similar experiment may be tried in metaphysics as regards the *intuition* of objects. If the intuition had to conform to the constitution of objects, I would not understand how we could know anything of them *a priori*; but if the object (as object of the senses) conformed to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, I could very well conceive such a possibility. As, however, I cannot rest in these intuitions if they are to become knowledge, but have to refer them as representations, to something as their object, and must determine this object through them, I can assume either that the *concepts* through which I arrive at this determination also conform to the object, and I would again be as perplexed about how I can know anything about it *a priori*; or else that the objects, or what is the same thing, the *experience* in which alone they are known (as objects that are given to us), conform to those concepts. In the latter case, I recognize an easier solution because experience itself is a kind of knowledge that requires understanding; and this understanding has its rules which I must presuppose as existing within me even before objects are given to me, and hence *a priori*. These rules are expressed in *a priori* concepts to which all objects of experience must necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. With regard to objects, insofar as they are thought merely through reason and thought indeed as necessary, and which can never, at least not in the way in which reason thinks them, be given in experience, the attempts at thinking them (for they must admit of being thought) will subsequently furnish an excellent touchstone of what we are adopting as our new method of thought, namely, that we know of things *a priori* only that which we ourselves put into them." ―from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Preface to the Second Edition. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 18-19

Attitude is a state of mind that results in an action taken or an emotion displayed. Attitude, in the end, is a motivator or that which generates or reflects motives.

At its lowest and most common level the “God has a plan” folks are those who settle for the least comforting of cold comforts. Why did little Johnny get run over by the garbage truck in the alley? Because God has a plan. There. Feel better now? And at its highest and most rarified level a plateful of blood-rare metaphysics provides a chewy, fragrant, vitamin-packed repast for the mind/heart willing to dig in and feast.

Authenticity is not a metaphysically distinctive way of being human; it is just a way of taking responsibility for what one has already been given.

At one moment, his eyes sparkled in the light and in the next they were enshrouded in shadow. What connected those bands of light and dark? Could they indeed have been distinct entities?

Because they are assertions about Being in the light of time properly understood, all ontological propositions are Temporal propositions. It is only because ontological propositions are Temporal propositions that they can and must be *a priori propositions*. It is only because ontology is a Temporal science that something like the *a priori* appears in it. *A priori* means "from the earlier" or "the earlier." "*Earlier*" is patently a *time-determination*. If we have been observant, it must have occurred to us that in our explications we employed no word more frequently than the expression "already." It "already antecedently" lies at the ground: "it must always already be understood beforehand": where beings are encountered, Being has "already beforehand" been projected. In using all of these temporal, really Temporal, terms we have in mind something that the tradition since Plato calls the *a priori*, even if it may not use the very term itself. In the preface to his *Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft [Metaphysical principles of natural science], Kant says: "Now to cognize something *a priori* means to cognize it from its mere possibility." Consequently, *a priori* means that which makes beings as beings possible in *what* and *how* they are. But why is this possibility labeled by the term "earlier"? Obviously not because we recognize it earlier than beings. For what we experience first and foremost is beings, that which is; we recognize Being only later or maybe even not at all. This time-determination "earlier" cannot refer to the temporal order given by the common concept of time in the sense of intratemporality. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that a time determination is present in the concept of the *a priori*, the earlier. But, because it is not seen how the interpretation of Being necessarily occurs in the horizon of time, the effort has to be made to explain away the time determination by means of the *a priori*. Some go so far as to say that the *a priori*―the essentialities, the determination of beings in their Being―is extratemporal, supratemporal, timeless. That which does the enabling, the possibilities are characterized by a time-determination, the earlier, because in this *a priori* nothing of time is supposed to be present, hence *locus a non lucendo*? Believe it if you wish." ―from_The Basic Problems of Phenomenology_

A witch is a woman who emerges from deep within herself. She is a woman who has honestly explored her light and learned to celebrate her darkness. She is a woman who is able to fall in love with the magnificent possibilities of her power. She is a woman who radiates mystery. She is magnetic. She is a witch.

Be alive, vital Ride the waves of turbulence Embrace Earth’s sacred ground Listen to vehicles carrying souls between forgotten dreams and the promise of a place warm and secure Perpetual motion Our lives’ treadmill, crushing experiences into sweet soul nectar Culminating in love’s powerful fulfilment and peace

Becoming 'color blind' isn't helpful. Who you are matters, how you are matters. Things like race and culture are a manifestation of flows of creation. Your identity doesn't just matter, without it your soul can't interact with the world. The key is we need to understand that all races, ethnic groups, cultures and like treasures are equal and we must remember to follow our soul rather than our identity. The identity is something the soul works through, not the other way around.

Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its 'universality' is to be sought higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character which an entity may possess. *Being is a transcendens pure and simple*. And the transcendence of Dasein's Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical *individuation*. Every disclosure of Being as the *transcendens* is *transcendental* knowledge. *Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis*. Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. These terms characterize philosophy itself with regard to its object and its way of treating that object. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of *existence*, has made fast the guide-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it *arises* and to which it *returns*." ―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, p. 62

Behind every effect there is a cause. You can never eliminate an effect without first understanding its cause.