Quotes About Philosophy

The question stops the man, as simple ones sometimes do. He stands lost in the universe's weeds, hunched a little from the stronger gravity of the world he visits.

But the senses never have much chance, against the power of doctrine.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.

Things with clean, concise, right answers are antidotes to human existence.

If life demanded a slavish commitment to one pursuit, there were worse things to commit to than calculating the cash value of death.

Once Ray starts a book, he force-marches through to its conclusion, however hard the slog. Dorothy doesn't mind skipping the author's philosophies to get to those moments when one character, often the most surprising, reaches down inside herself and is better than her nature allows.

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

He's reached the age when dead is the new normal.

Which is bigger, outer space or inner?

the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.

The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and came back bitterly disillusioned: "Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much of the stories in the Bible could not be true. . . 

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?

We have spent centuries of philosophy trying to solve the problem of evil, yet I believe the much more confounding and astounding issue is the problem of good. How do we account for so much gratuitous and sheer goodness in this world? Tackling this problem would achieve much better results.

The good, the true, and the beautiful are always their own best argument for themselves—by themselves—and in themselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, said that what he resented in most Christians was what he perceived as a constant underlying resentment: (1) a denied resentment toward God for demanding sacrifice, (2) toward others for not appreciating our sacrifice, (3) sacrificing as much as we sacrifice, (4) and a resentment toward others for not having to do it!

Human sympathy is the best and easiest way to open the heart space and to make us live inside our own bodies. God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it's okay if it takes a while to get there. Our central message again bears repeating: God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.

At this point, at least in the United States, it appears that our cultural meaning has pretty much shrunk down to this: it is all about winning. Then, once you win, it becomes all about consuming. I can discern no other underlying philosophy in the practical order of American life today. Of itself, such a worldview cannot feed the soul very well or very long, much less provide meaning and encouragement, or engender love or community.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.

God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God.

Life moves first toward diversity and then toward union of that very diversity at ever higher levels. It is the old philosophical problem of "the one and the many

What made us think we were

We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe.

So what? Few men, Miles reflected, lived so comfortably within the confines of a two.word personal philosophy.