Quotes About Philosophy

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

Religion… is a man's total reaction upon life.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their "agreement," as falsity means their disagreement, with "reality."

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

Pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively. Monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational.

The philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Religion, whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life.

The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist.

There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is, to contradict other philosophers.

What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise -- although the philosophers generally call it recognition!

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.

But fear is a cheap emotion, however full of wisdom. And, emotionally speaking, I've always thought of myself as a man of expensive taste.

Fishing, Danny boy, is purely a state of mind. Some men, when they are fishing, are after fish. Me, I'm after things you could never set a barbed hook in.

What comes, comes, why bark?

A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.

1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse. 3) (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.

Nietzsche put the idea this way: "Man shall be trained for war and woman for the procreation of the warrior. All else is folly." He went further. In Thus Spake Zarathustra he exclaims: "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip!"—which

In small letters, now a little blurry, it read Omnia mea mecum porto, Latin for "All that is mine I carry with me.

I have found that the more I reflect philosophically on the attributes of God the more overwhelmed I become at his greatness and the more excited I become about Bible doctrine. Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person.

Ask a physics teacher: Why do elementary particles exist? Is it impossible for them not to exist? (Be prepared for the possibility that your physics teacher doesn't want to have this conversation.)

If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he's making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists.