Quotes About Metaphysics

There are laws of nature - of course there are - even if they don't exist in some sort of bizarre Platonic Heaven.

Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

God is a philosophical black hole-the point where reason breaks down.

Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

The ultimate philosophical challenge is to reveal the ontology of God.

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.

There is a continuum between science and philosophy. As Fichte said (but did not practice), philosophy should be the science of sciences.

The final philosophy is the ontology of God.

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

The unrest which keeps the never-stopping clock metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

Philosophy is about everything when I say everything I mean both something and nothing. Something is what we can perceive and nothing is beyond our senses.

Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics

The material world, as conceived by materialists, however, is continually confused with reality as such.

On materialist principles, our minds are limited to the material constitution of our brains (minds transcending brains are simply not an option for materialism), and our brains are simply more complicated arrangements of balls going down inclined planes and coins being tossed. Thus we are not in control, we are not free.

It is a striking fact that the history of each science shows continuity back to its first use of measurement, before which it exhibits no ancestry but metaphysics.

But there was one thing more about quantum physics that thoroughly annoyed most of the scientists who truly understood its implications. Because it dealt so intimately with the nature of matter—and reality—quantum physics also had quite a few things to say about things that, until recently, were strictly the preserve, not of physics, but of metaphysics . . . of religion, and—whisper it softly—of philosophy.11

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?"[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God

The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?