Quotes About Metaphysics

Now where there are no parts, there neither extension, nor shape, nor divisibility is possible. And these monads are the true atoms of nature and, in a word, the elements of things.

In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.

I have found it helpful to ask not 'In what circumstances is a plank a part of a ship?' but, rather, 'In what circumstances do planks compose (add up to, form) something?

They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.

Según la doctrina idealista, los verbos vivir y soñar son rigurosamente sinónimos.

Hudson says that many times in his life he undertook the study of metaphysics, but happiness always interrupted him.

There are systems upon systems that are incredible but possessed of a pleasing architecture or a certain agreeable sensationalism. The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility - they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know a system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects - any one of them.

Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.

True love Before I fell in love with you My passion was for philosophic proof. For metaphysics and theology. My search was for the esoteric truth, For inner worlds and hid divinity. I only saw the truths inside my mind; My brain was blind To love's mystery.

If a person shows that such things as wood, stones, and the like, being many are also one, we admit that he shows the coexistence of the one and many, but he does not show that the many are one or the one many; he is uttering not a paradox but a truism.

Pythagoras, when he was asked what time was, answered that it was the soul of this world.

Everything in the cosmos now proves to be relative. Nothing is autonomous in itself. All things in the world betray their interdependence with each other. Metaphysics ceases to be an abstract system of thought and becomes an experiential reality. Not beings in the world but the world itself comes to be questioned.

When we can no longer divide, we are beyond Nature and approach the causal Cause, the abstract Cause. This is why the whole of metaphysics, all creation, is situated between the numbers One and Two.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.

What's fun is that when you're no longer attached to being one separate part of it, you get to be part of all of it. At that point the all is known to you subjectively, and you are everywhere at once, because you are no longer pinned in a space-time locus by your separateness. Metaphysics tell me that, and physics tell me that. Everything I have experienced in all my inner work points to that.

Philosopher William Lane Craig reminds us that an infinite regress of causes is like trying to jump out of a bottomless pit. How do you start if you never reach the bottom? On the other hand, one might well ask, if every birth is a rebirth, what kamma was paid for in his first birth?

Killing for sport is the perfect type of that pure evil for which metaphysicians have sometimes sought. Most wicked deeds are done because the doer proposes some good to himself ... [but] the killer for sport has no such comprehensible motive. He prefers death to life, darkness to light. He gets nothing except the satisfaction of saying, Something that wanted to live is dead. There is that much less vitality, consciousness, and, perhaps, joy in the universe. I am the Spirit that Denies.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

The emotional involvement, the pity, desire, and compassion of the bhakti gods causes them to forget that they are above it all, as metaphysics demands, and reduces them to the human level, as mythology demands.

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term

Epistemology: The study of knowledge. It basically asks, What is a rational test for knowability? How can we know for certain what is real? How can we know which propositions are true and which are not? What are basic principles of certainty? Epistemology attempts to lay down the line between knowledge and mere belief. It is one of the main topics of philosophy, along with logic, ethics, and metaphysics.

Logical Positivism: An early-twentieth-century school of philosophy that limits the scope of philosophy to the scientific method (empirical verification) and logic. Everything else philosophy once considered, such as metaphysics and ethics and theology, is tossed out the window as unverifiable and therefore meaningless.

Metaphysics: One of the main topics of philosophy and a bit of a catchall for everything that isn't logic, epistemology, or ethics. Metaphysics looks at the Big Picture: What is "being"? What is the cosmos and what is it made of? Also, incidentally, what is the meaning of life?