Quotes About Philosophy

it is possible that we are the only persons,> said another robot.

As soon as we have the power to release our minds from the immediate here and now, in a sense we are free. We are free to revisit the past, free to reframe the present, and free to anticipate a whole range of possible futures. Imagination is the foundation of everything that is uniquely and distinctively human. It is the basis of language, the arts, the sciences, systems of philosophy, and the all the vast intricacies of human culture.

According to Carl Rogers, the burgeoning of personal growth was stimulated by the decline of organized religious beliefs and the need to find alternative sources of meaning in existence

Is life essentially accidental and meaningless, or is it as profound and mysterious as Shakespeare's great tragic hero believed it to be?

Socrates was quoted as saying "The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit.

Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.

Humans are, as Sartre put it, 'condemned to be free'. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

Faith, wrote Origen (185–245), perhaps the first great Christian theologian, is 'useful for the multitude', a means of teaching 'those who cannot abandon everything and pursue a study of rational argument to believe without thinking out their reasons'.

Even the most minor inconvenience, Chrysippus suggested, had been carefully designed by God for our benefit. God had created bedbugs to 'awaken us out of our sleep' and mice to encourage humans to be tidy.

We would not deny the mind; but merely remember that as the corrective of wrong thinking is right thinking, the corrective of all thinking is the body.

The word logos itself is a prime example, beginning its history as a word charged with religious power, and referring to the word of wisdom and truth. By the time of Aristotle, logos had lost its philosophical connotations and had come to mean the "study of" something: biology, the study of life; zoology, the study of animal forms; and theology, the study of God.

Emperor Marcus Aurelius: We should not say I am an Athenian or I am a Roman but I am a citizen of the Universe...For there is only one universe, one God, one truth. —Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Bader's philosophy was my philosophy. His whole attitude to life was mine.

Art is not to throw light but to be light...

Reality is neither good nor bad; it is a matter of how we choose to perceive it. For someone who has mastered the art of seeing, the world is always perfect. External reality does not have to change in order to make us happy. The secret lies in changing our perception of it.

The point of Zen is not to defy reason but to recognize the limitations of rationality.

Vegetarianism -- You are what you eat, and who wants to be a lettuce?

I presume that it is the better part of wisdom that we bow to our fate with as good grace as possible.

We can say nothing but what hath been said.

The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only those, who have heard the voice of Socrates across the centuries. The others are a superior kind of cattle.

I was involved, like John Glenn and some of the other astronauts, with a particular church. So I felt it was appropriate for me to demonstrate my Christian background [by taking Communion on the moon]. Today, my philosophy is more like what Albert Einstein called a cosmic sense of a greater power involved in the creation of the universe. It's very nonspecific.

The most we can do is to die--contented, discontent; With a few to wonder why, and whither our spirit went, And what the interval meant!

Take two from one you can't, that's very true; But any person can take one from two.