Quotes About Philosophy

To be and not to be are just two ideas opposing each other. But they are not reality, and they do not describe reality.

Now I see that if one doesn't know how to die, one can hardly know how to live—because death is a part of life.

Most approaches to leadership share two common problems. As we've discussed in this chapter, they fail to account adequately for mindset and therefore put too much faith in our ability to change behavior without addressing mindset. In addition, however, a problem that originated in Western thought some four hundred years ago has led to mindset and leadership approaches that are built on a mistake.

The Divine is what you adore in Sri Aurobindo.

In fact, if one reads attentively what Sri Aurobindo has written, all that he has written, one would have the answer to every question.

True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.

There is no right life in the wrong one.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

Cum mulieribus non est disputandum, as Cicero says.

We are not purely material beings," he continued. "Dr. Bell would say that we are not material beings at all, although I would not go that far. But we are surrounded by waves of energy. You've seen them in operation, even if you have not seen the waves themselves.

The Cartesian point of moral epistemology: I'm angry, therefore I'm right.

the practice of medicine in a large and kindly way had led him to the conclusion that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies and in our small neighborhood relationships.

What's freedom for? To know eternity.

Qui suis-je, moi, pour tirer des conclusions positives au sujet de la moralité et des codes qui puissent servir à l'humanité entière ?

Ask the next question, and the one that follows that, and the one that follows that. It's the symbol of everything humanity has ever created, and is the reason it has been created.

Inner space is so much more interesting, because outer space is so empty.

It is said that God has created man in his own image. But it may be that humankind has created God in the image of humankind.

Zen is none other than Buddhism.

The universe and the person who creates the universe are not two different entities. Some Christian theologians say that God is the ground of being. This is quite close to Buddhism. But then Buddhism asks the question, If God is the ground of being, then what is the ground of nonbeing?

Life is short; it must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculations which will not be able to bring us the Truth.

The concept of "emptiness" here is not a form of nihilism as some early Western scholars of Buddhism thought; it simply means that all things are empty of an inherent, unchanging, and permanent nature—no thing exists independently and remains fixed, but arises due to a set of constantly changing causes and conditions. This is the insight of interbeing.

Instead of saying that being leads to birth, we should say that being and nonbeing lead to birth and death. In our head, we have become used to the idea that when we are born we come into being out of nonbeing and when we die we go from being into nonbeing. If we remove the idea of being and nonbeing, there is no more idea of birth and death.

If one clings merely to a system of concepts, one only becomes stuck. The meditation on interdependence is to help one penetrate reality in order to be one with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion or meditation methods. The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself.