Quotes About Philosophy

I was drawn to authors and others who were explicitly outside of the Christian tradition . . . Such as Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), Robert Bly (Iron John), Don Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements), and Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly). I also re-read Viktor Frankl's classic Man's Search for Meaning (which my daughter Lizz and my wife Sue also read while Lizz was away).

Faith describes our whole way of looking at life and how we act on that.

Consciousness is just a window into time.

Time travel is pure bullshit, impossible; nobody can defeat causality or entropy.

Economics is dead, and true equality will rise out of the ashes. We've turned our back on materialism, rejected it completely. It has no purpose anymore. Now we can live as we please, develop our minds not our finances.

You are going to have to make considerable adjustments to your culture now you know humans have an immortal soul.

I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.

In conclusion, the neuroscientific accounts of LeDoux and Damasio deepen the Spinozistic insight that we are embodied minds.

The study of reasons for opinions is at the centre of philosophy.

Many philosophers in the English-speaking world felt vindicated by the Sokal hoax. Although English-speaking philosophy had produced radical ideas about science, for the most part it had not accepted postmodernism and other French-influenced literary-philosophical movements.

the Garden of Ediacara.

Every theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.

When people are going to be taken from you anyway, then it would be better if you had never come to care for them.

For my part, I never talk to the child about time. We talk about other things -- though not about anything much -- and never about tomorrow. For me that is impossible. Tomorrow we could all be wiped out. You think back upon all the promises you did not manage to keep. Talk about time and you will always end up making promises. Then it is better to say nothing at all, no matter what.

I can't imagine that anything like the Christian image of hell actually exists. But lately I've been wondering about the ancient Greenlandic realm of the dead. If you consider all the unpleasantness you encounter while you're alive, it seems improbable that it would all come to an end simply because you're dead.

Bertrand Russell wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don't know what we're talking about or to what extent what we say is true or false.

Vad är en ängel, frågade apan. Madelene skakade på huvudet. - Det har jag aldrig riktigt förstått, sa hon. Men kanske är det en tredjedel gud, en tredjedel djur och en tredjedel människa.

Wir verkümmern, lieber Herr Doktor, weil wir nur noch meinen und nicht mehr denken.

Why? Because he believed that "living in the expectation of death . . . would . . . be . . . harder" than living with an illusion. His position may have been highly humane, but it was also debilitating.

He's getting old. I don't count the years. I don't multiply by seven. They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn't they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?

Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

Now in her mid-sixties, she had "common-lawed"—her words—old Ansel, who used to manage ranches in California and now spent most of his days rereading the Russians. Chekhov, Turgenev, Pushkin. Ren had once asked him why he loved them, as he himself found the going mostly too dour. "I don't love them," Ansel had said. "You don't?" "Nothing worth serious study is lovable.

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

What is evil? What do you think it is? She didn't think for more than a second. She tossed her loose gray hair off the side of her face and said, "Impediment to Being.