Quotes About Philosophy

We are meaning-seeking creatures.

The only way to show a true respect for God is to act morally while ignoring God's existence." ? A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Humanism is itself a religion without God—not all religions, of course, are theistic.

Human beings seem framed to pose problems for themselves that they cannot solve, pit themselves against the dark world of uncreated reality, and find that living with such unknowing is a source of astonishment and delight.

There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.

People would continue to adopt a particular conception of the divine because it worked for them, not because it was scientifically or philosophically sound.

The ancients had believed that nothing came from nothing, but Heidegger reversed this maxim: ex nihilo omne qua ens fit. He ended his lecture by posing a question asked by Leibniz: "Why are there beings at all, rather than just nothing?

as the philosopher Walter Benjamin put it: "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism."24

Thomas Aquinas may have given the impression that God was just another item—albeit the highest—in the chain of being, but he had personally been convinced that these philosophical arguments bore no relation to the mystical God he had experienced in prayer. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, leading theologians and churchmen continued to argue the existence of God on entirely rational grounds.

You could stamp on this natural shoot of compassion, Mencius argued, just as you can cripple or deform your body, but if you cultivate this altruistic tendency assiduously, it will acquire a dynamic power of its own.23 The

You entered into a Socratic dialogue in order to change; the object of the exercise was to create a new, more authentic self.

Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment. His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of Islam may have been reactionary, but it was also revolutionary. He outraged the conservative ulama, who clung to the textbook answers, and criticized the Mamluk government of Syria for practices which contravened Islamic law as he understood it.

if they did not interrogate their most fundamental beliefs, they would live superficial, expedient lives, because "the unexamined life is not worth living."7

Like any Platonist, he experienced knowledge as remembrance, as known to him already at some profound level of his being.

The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) distinguished between a problem, "something met which bars my passage" and "is before me in its entirety," and a mystery, "something in which I find myself caught up, and whose essence is not before me in its entirety."69

The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked "We don't know anything" and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.16

There was a strain of ruthlessness and cruelty in early modern thought. The so called humanists were pioneering a rather convenient idea of natural rights to counter the brutality and intolerance they associated with conventional religion. This philosophy of human rights did not apply to all human beings.

What do you think Socrates meant when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? Third

advocates of evolutionary theory since Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) have found altruism problematic.

The Socratic dialogue was a spiritual exercise designed to produce a profound psychological change in the participants, and because its purpose was that each person should understand the depth of his ignorance, there was no way that anybody could win. Plato

As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected.

the moral and spiritual imperatives of religion are important for humanity and should not be relegated unthinkingly to the scrap heap of history in the interests of an unfettered rationalism.

we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again. We

What if we were to acknowledge that the nature of materiality itself, not merely the materiality of human embodiment, always already entails "an exposure to the Other"?