Quotes About Philosophy

if you know whether a man is a decided monist or a decided pluralist, you perhaps know more about the rest of his opinions than if you give him any other name ending in IST. To believe in the one or in the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences.

How can you eat anything with eyes?

I was just thinking, if it is really religion with these nudist colonies, they sure must turn atheists in the wintertime.

In Gilead, the narrator's friend's son describes himself not as an atheist but in "state of categorical unbelief." He says, "I don't even believe God doesn't exist, if you see what I mean." I pointed this passage out to Mom and said it closely matched my own views--I just didn't think about religion.

Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

The latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize that someone made that chair, and someone sold it, and someone delivered it—and you are the beneficiary of all that. Just because they didn't do it especially for you doesn't mean you aren't blessed to be using it and enjoying it.

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.

Waarom zal ik mij moreel gedragen, als ik toch in ieder geval de doodstraf krijg? Iedereen krijgt nou eenmaal de doodstraf en iedereen weet het.

Je zou een tweede hoofd moeten hebben om te begrijpen wat dat éne hoofd is, maar ik heb er maar een, hier is het in mijn handen, ik houd het vast op een manier waarop een mens nooit iets anders vasthoudt.

Alles wat geen natuurwet is, is dogma.

The material world, as conceived by materialists, however, is continually confused with reality as such.

Materialism is adept at transforming illusions of possibility into settled verities.

my atheism is a conviction not based on evidence, though it leads me to seek a certain kind of solution to the evident inadequacy of materialism.

On materialist principles, our minds are limited to the material constitution of our brains (minds transcending brains are simply not an option for materialism), and our brains are simply more complicated arrangements of balls going down inclined planes and coins being tossed. Thus we are not in control, we are not free.

Science must not degenerate into applied materialistic philosophy. But this is exactly what it does at the hands of today's alchemists, namely, the materialistic evolutionists who hold their views not because of empirical evidence but because of a prior metaphysical commitment to materialism.

How many a world-embracing creed has sprung from a tiny contradiction in terms!

Fantastic plays, which assume an order of things more or less exempt from the limitations of physical reality, ought nevertheless to be logically faithful to their own assumptions.

To me, it seems that mankind can never achieve its highest potentialities till it has thrown off the incubus of historic (and prehistoric) religion.

Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won't be able to fulfill.

Indeed, pursuing pleasure, Seneca warns, is like pursuing a wild beast: On being captured, it can turn on us and tear us to pieces. Or, changing the metaphor a bit, he tells us that intense pleasures, when captured by us, become our captors, meaning that the more pleasures a man captures, "the more masters will he have to serve.

Stoicism, understood properly, is a cure for a disease. The disease in question is the anxiety, grief, fear, and various other negative emotions that plague humans and prevent them from experiencing a joyful existence.

Throughout the millennia and across cultures, those who have thought carefully about desire have drawn the conclusion that spending our days working to get whatever it is we find ourselves wanting is unlikely to bring us either happiness or tranquility.

To be virtuous, then, is to live as we were designed to live; it is to live, as Zeno put it, in accordance with nature.18 The Stoics would add that if we do this, we will have a good life.

On reading these and the other irritants Seneca lists, one is struck by how little human nature has changed in the past two millennia.