Quotes About Existence

If children learn of sex as a relation between their parents to which they owe their own existence, they learn of it in its best form and in connection with its biological purpose.

Philosophy is no longer the pillar of fire going before a few intrepid seekers after truth: it is rather an ambulance following in the wake of the struggle for existence and picking up the weak and wounded.

There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life.

there is no such thing as matter at all, and that the world consists of nothing but minds and their ideas. Hylas

Berkeley retains the merit of having shown that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity.

it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years.

All joy in true thought is part of the intellectual love of God

While I wanted to think everything false, it must necessarily be that I who thought was something; and remarking that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so solid and so certain that all the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of upsetting it, I judged that I could receive it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that I sought.

Is consciousness ultimate and simple, something to be merely accepted and contemplated? Or is it something complex, perhaps consisting in our way of behaving in the presence of objects, or, alternatively, in the existence in us of things called ideas, having a certain relation to objects, though different from them, and only symbolically representative of them?

The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Eternal life, according to some theologians, for example, Dean Inge, does not mean existence throughout every moment of future time, but a mode of being wholly independent of time, in which there is no before and after, and therefore no logical possibility of change.

Si nous n'avions pas peur de la mort , je ne crois pas que serait jamais née l'idée d'immortalité.

Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of every-day common sense.

It follows, in the words of Epicurus, that "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor.

It has been finely said that if Judaism as a religion had perished under Antiochus, the seed-bed of Christianity would have been lacking; and thus the blood of the Maccabean martyrs, who saved Judaism, ultimately became the seed of the Church. Therefore as not only Christendom but also Islam derive their monotheism from a Jewish source, it may well be that the world to-day owes the very existence of monotheism both in the East and in the West to the Maccabees.

There is, to begin with, the historical aspect. "There can be no living science," says Dr. Whitehead, "unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an order of things, and in particular, of an order of Nature." Science could only have been created by men who already had this belief, and therefore the original source of the belief must have been pre-scientific.

But if the reality is not what appears, have we any means of knowing whether there is any reality at all? And if so, have we any means of finding out what it is like?

Memory does not prolong the existence of the past; it is merely one way in which the past has effects.

A limerick by Ronald Knox, with a reply, sets forth Berkeley's theory of material objects: There was a young man who said, "God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there's no one about in the Quad." REPLY Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that's why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, GOD

Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile?