Quotes About Philosophy

Boards don't hit back.

Before me now there is only one real fact -- Death. The truth I have been seeking -- this truth is Death. Yet Death is also a seeker. Forever seeking me. So -- we have met at last. And I am prepared. I am at peace. Because I will conquer death with death.

Some old guy once said that the meaning of life is that it ends.

curriculum committee were not entirely wrong. Death is not a philosophical issue; it is a literary one. And yet, if philosophy

this: what matters is not how we die but rather why we choose to live.

Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forwards. —Søren Kierkegaard

There are just some kind of men ... who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one.

In America, everything seemed fixable, and in Japan, difficult problems were to be endured. Shoganai, shoganai. How many times had he heard those words? It cannot be helped. His mother had apparently hated that expression, and suddenly he understood her rage against this cultural resignation that violated her beliefs and wishes. Book 3, page 456

Truth is produced, not discovered, and is a property not of the world but of statements.

THE GREEK PHILOSOPHER HERACLITUS left us a lovely epigram: Nature loves to hide. It is so often true. There is no way Heraclitus could have seen an atom. No matter how much his fellow philosophers speculated about them, to see an atom was beyond any technology they might have imagined.

There is no meaning to space that is independent of the relationships among real things of the world. [...] Space is nothing apart from the things that exist. [...] If we take out all the words we are not left with an empty sentence, we are left with nothing.

Any feature of the world at a future time can be computed from the configuration of the present. That is, the passage of time can be replaced by a computation, which means that the future is logically a consequence of the present.

If infinities are signs of missing unification, a unified theory will have none. It will be what we call a finite theory, a theory that answers every question in terms of sensible finite numbers.

We have to find a way to unfreeze time-to represent time without turning it into space. I have no idea how to do this. I can't conceive of a mathematics that doesn't represent a world as if it were frozen in eternity. It's terribly hard to represent time, and that's why there's a good chance that this representation is the missing piece.

We seem to experience time passing as a smooth flow of moments. Barbour insists that the passage of time is an illusion and that reality consists of nothing but a vast pile of moments, each a configuration of the whole universe. You now are experiencing a moment. Now you are experiencing a different moment. According to Barbour, both moments exist eternally and timelessly, in the pile of moments. Reality is nothing but this frozen collection of moments outside time.

Science is not philosophers sitting in clouds. It is a human activity, as complex and problematic as any other.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there's no other materialistic explanation.

My Soul lives many lives. Each life a thought, each thought a life. I am but Thought.

We should like Nature to go no further; we should like it to be finite, like our mind; but this is to ignore the greatness and majesty of the Author of things.

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.

Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.

Natural religion itself, seems to decay very much. Many will have human souls to be material: others make God himself a corporeal being.

For things remain possible, even if God does not choose them. Indeed, even if God does not will something to exist, it is possible for it to exist, since, by its nature, it could exist if God were to will it to exist.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.