Quotes About Philosophy

As Chuang Tzu says: Too much pleasure? Yang has too much influence. Too much suffering? Yin has too much influence.28

Chinese alchemy parallels European alchemy in postulating the change from watery lead (nigredo) to fiery heart (rubedo) and then to pure white (albedo) or gold (also known as the Philosopher's Stone).22 Understandably, in ancient Greece, a "similar archetypal concept of a perfect being is that of Platonic man, round on all sides and uniting within himself the two sexes."23

Buber, M. (1990) The Way of Man.

The true men of old were not afraid When they stood alone in their views. They had no mind to fight Tao. They did not try, by their own contriving, To help Tao along. These are the ones we call true men. Minds free, thoughts gone All that came out of them Came quiet, like the four seasons. 24

Alchemists sometimes say that Buddhism starts with fire while Taoism starts with water."134

Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.

Marx wrote his dissertation on Epicurus, and he was familiar with Greek thought. Aristotle, as you will see, provides a frequent anchor for his arguments.

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.

A man has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it and one's religion is never complete and final, it seems, but must always be undergoing modification.

My whole working philosophy is that the only stable happiness for mankind is that it shall live married in blessed union to woman-kind - intimacy, physical and psychical between a man and his wife. I wish to add that my state of bliss is by no means perfect.

If one were to bring ten of the wisest men in the world together and ask them what was the most stupid thing in existence, they would not be able to discover anything so stupid as astrology.

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

Beauty in things lies in the mind which contemplates them.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.

Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.

The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.

Opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.

Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell deadborn from the press.

Human Nature is the only science of man and yet has been hitherto the most neglected.

Beauty in things exist in the mind which contemplates them.

History is the discovering of the constant and universal principles of human nature.

To philosopher and historian the madness and imbecile wickedness of mankind ought to appear ordinary events.