Quotes About Philosophy

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.

Whatever we cannot understand easily we call God; this saves wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.

I am hopeful, though not full of hope, and the only reason I don't believe in happy endings is because I don't believe in endings.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

But of the seven deadly sins, wrath is the healthiest - next only to lust.

Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp.

Not all questions can be answered.

Beyond atheism, nontheism. I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

What do we know? What do we really know? He licks his dried cracked lips. We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.

Life's a dog and then you die? No no. Life is a joyous dance through daffodils beneath cerulean blue skies and then, then what? I forget what happens next." -A Fool's Progress

I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture.

In this respect the differences between the USA and the USSR are those of evangelical dinosaurs competing for domination on one small planet: the first deifies Jesus Christ, the other Karl Marx. Neither has much practical interest in what those two sincere and hard-working fellows actually preached.

I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.

Reason is and ought to be, as Hume said, the slave of the passions.

The more we learn of outer space and inner space, of quasars and quarks, of Big Bangs and Little Blips, the more remote, abstract and intellectually inconsequential it all becomes.

A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity.

We know this apodictic rock beneath our feet. That dogmatic sun above our heads. The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.