Quotes About Philosophy

We are none of us born into Eden, Doc said reasonably. World's plenty evil when we get here. Question is, what's the best way to play a bad hand?

Instead, I'd signed up for classes related to linguistic philosophy, for which I had even less talent. In Walt's own seminar, we were reading neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer—a brick I broke my brain on.

The idea that being scientific simply means being irreligious is a particularly naive one. It has caused a lot of confusion and will get us nowhere.

This book is about the problem of evil, but not quite in the traditional sense, since I see it as our problem, not God's. It

Fatalism is now offered, not as just one possible philosophical attitude among others with reasons given for and against it, but as a fact backed by the tremendous authority of science.

What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

I'll just leave you with this. I don't care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's enough to know that for some people, they exist, and that they dance.

What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.

I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility

How does any of us live in this world? One thing compensates for another, I suppose. Sometimes what's wrong does not hurt at all, but rather shines like a new moon.

I think this is / the prettiest world—so long as you don't mind / a little dying

In the words of the late Francis Crick...You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)

Not that there's anything wrong with just lying around on your back. In it's way, rotting is interesting too, as we will see. It's just that there are other ways to spend your time as a cadaver.

Edison believed that living beings were animated and controlled by "life units," smaller-than-microscopic entities that inhabited each and every cell and, upon death, evacuated the premises, floated around awhile, and eventually reassembled to animate a new personality—possibly another man, possibly an ocelot or a sea cucumber.

Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken.

We are fashioned creatures, but half made up.

My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.

Evil thenceforth became my good.

Poetry and its creations, philosophy and its researches and classifications, alike awoke the sleeping ideas in my mind, and gave me new ones.

Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come?

What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination?

Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;      Nought may endure but mutability!

It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed, than an intrinsic love for the science itself.