Quotes About Philosophy

Every philosophy of life will have an anthropology—a stance on what a human is. Do we interpret the human being through the grid of economics and class struggle (Marxism), biology and the struggle to survive (naturalistic Darwinism), or suffering produced by attachment to transitory things (Buddhism)? Are we bundles of experiences, streams of consciousness?

I greatly appreciate the work of Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga. He has observed that many academicians have a disdain for the term popularizer. However, he urges Christian philosophers not to leave their work "buried away in professional journals" but to make it available to the broader Christian community. If they don't connect their work to the life of the church, then they "neglect a crucial and central part of their task as believing philosophers.

from birth we are all philosophers, we are all theologians, and we all function like archeologists, digging through the mound of our existence to make sense of it all.

We are all theologians. We are all philosophers. We are all archaeologists who dig into the mounds of our lives to try to make sense of the civilization that is our story. This God-designed mental motivation is accompanied by wonderful and mysterious analytical gifts. This drive and those gifts set us apart from the rest of creation. They are holy, created by God to draw us to him, so that we can know him and understand ourselves in light of his existence and will.

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament.

No one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word "day.

If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.

So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.

We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones.

Religious language, like all language, can also so easily be used as an instrument of power by which some people seek to control other people. That's an abiding danger every time we open our mouth and speak, contemporary philosophers tell us, so we have to be aware of it and be on guard against it. Our guard goes down and the temptation to turn religious language into power language goes up when we take that language in a too literal, or too precise, or univocal sense.

any Christian theology of religions worth its name has to be biblical. If it's not, it may make for a good philosophy of religions, but it can't be called Christian.

No one is good; no one is evil; everyone is both, in the same way and in different ways. It would be needless to point this out if the unscrupulous were not always saying the opposite. It's so small a thing, the life of man, and yet there is time to do great things, fragments of the common task. I wish to love, and I cannot. I wish not to love, and I cannot.

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Where do we come from?" "What are we?""Where are we going?

In his school, Bertrand Russell thought it was better if they had the sex, so they could give their undivided attention to mathematics, which was the main thing.

The philosophic aim of education must be to get each one out of his isolated class and into the one humanity. Prudence and responsibility are not middle-class virtues but human virtues.

They searched for unity almost in unison. (Einstein and Schrodinger)

What God has put asunder, man should not join together, (Pauli to Weyl)

True Pantheism has rarely been recorded in Christianity, for the very good reason that until the late seventeenth century it would have been punished as profound heresy. The few pantheists who did stick their necks out often paid for it with the burning of their books and often with excommunication and death.

They felt the need to go beyond Atheism, which simply denies the existence of a personal creator God and takes no positive positions about how we should live our lives or how we should feel about the Universe/Nature.

Toland was the first modern pantheist to combine a religious reverence for the Universe, with respect for science, and a belief that everything is made of matter. A pantheist, he wrote to the German philosopher Leibniz, was one of those persons "who believe in no other eternal being but the universe." When asked for a brief statement of his credo, Toland replied, "The sun is my father, the earth my mother, the world is my country and all men are my family.

That's how the world is, and there is nothing an insignificant nobody like you, or even a significant somebody like me, can do about it.