Quotes About Philosophy

Robert A. Heinlein

He knew that he did not invent the information brought to him by his senses. There had to be something else out there, some otherness that produced the things his senses recorded. All philosophies that claimed that the physical world around him did not exist except in his imagination were sheer nonsense. But

You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct." "Sir? I thought—But he does! I have." "No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not—and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die … and accepts his sentence undismayed.

There is a universal sense in humans that there is unity and cohesion at the heart of life, and that it is possible for us to be consciously aware of it. So far as I can discover, it is this awareness of the primordial and essential unity of the human psyche that most religions and philosophies have referred to as enlightenment.

Proverbs in many languages point out these three levels of consciousness. One story, for instance, relates that the simple man comes home in the evening wondering what's for dinner, the complex man comes home pondering the imponderables of fate, and the enlightened man comes home wondering what's for dinner.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche explored the burden of the unlived that is not reclaimed: Zarathustra goes to the grave with the unfulfilled dreams of his youth. He speaks to them as if they were ghosts who have betrayed him bitterly. They struck up a dance and then spoiled the music. Did the past make his path so weighty? Did his unlived life impede him and consign him to a life that seems not to pass?

We're trapped in linguistic constructs... all that is is metaphor.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called model agnosticism and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski , the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, The map is not the territory. Alan Watts , a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as The menu is not the meal.

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence....

G.W.F. Hegel . He's perfect, Weishaupt wrote.... Unlike Kant , who makes sense only in German, this man doesn't make sense in any language.

I can summarize my thoughts now by simply saying each must find his or her own Way because the way does not exist.

If it were Hegel , I might suspect it means nothing. But Goethe means something, always.

There is no complete theory of anything.

Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.

he had an ego so large that only by contemplating the mathematical definition of infinity could anything so limitless be imagined.

Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.

I'm very interested in Marxist theory. I disagree with it, but I keep thinking about it, because some Marxist theory does seem to work.

I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.) - Robert Anton Wilson

You asked me what linguistics I find most pernicious. I started with is. The either/or habit is very pernicious. It seems very pernicious to me, I mean. Two-valued situations are relatively rare, actually.

Tentative Model #1: The perceived universe is a mixture of the "real universe" and our own "Thinker" — proving its pet beliefs.

The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real.

Many a novel or play written in 1930, which seemed brutally realistic then, now seems a little quaint and unreal in places, because we no longer live in the semantic environment of 60 years ago. Joyce's Ulysses escaped this trap by not having a point of view at all, at all — his multiple narrator technique gives multiple points of view — just as post-Copenhagen physicists escape it by what they call model agnosticism, not accepting any one model as equal to the whole universe.