Quotes About Philosophy

Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

However, to say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought "I could have done otherwise" after doing whatever I in fact did. This is an empty affirmation.

I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

Some say while religious fundamentalists betray reason. Moderates betray faith and reason equally. -Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion(Documentary)

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers and better or worse ways to put them to use.

Religion is a term like sports ... To speak of sports as a generic activity makes it impossible to discuss what athletes actually do or the physical attributes to do it. What do all sports have in common apart from breathing? Not much. The term religion is hardly more useful.

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.

The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil (this is traditionally called the problem of theodicy) is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics. Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is not little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.

Free will is an illusion.

Our wills are simply not of own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have

How many hours of human labor will be devoured today, by an imaginary God?

Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms—but this doesn't negate the truth or utility of physics.

It solves the problem of "free will" by ignoring it. How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.

Once one is beyond a certain level of commitment to the sport, life begins to seem an allegory of rowing rather than rowing an allegory of life.

Judo is the way to the most effective use of both physical and spiritual strength.

There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

In every chain of reasoning, the evidence of the last conclusion can be no greater than that of the weakest link of the chain, whatever may be the strength of the rest.

There is not a single argument nor a single fact that can be offered in favour of flesh eating that cannot be offered, with equal strength, in favour of cannibalism.

General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.

Develop the strength of a man, but live as gently as a woman

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.