Quotes About Metaphysics

Like the Schoolmen, but for different reasons, the Indians distinguish between the personality (which is for us the spiritual subsistence of the soul) and the material individuality (which arises from the dispositions of the body).

He was insane, he thought people were trying to destroy him, to suck out his guts, but, she noted, in the rare event that someone was trying to destroy you, to suck out your guts, insanity was a goodly metaphysics.

Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction.

You must know that it is very injurious to begin with this branch of philosophy, viz., Metaphysics; or to explain [at first] the sense of the similes occurring in prophecies, and interpret the metaphors which are employed in historical accounts and which abound in the writings of the Prophets.

He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.

The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.

Diodorus held that nothing can be moved, since to be moved it must be taken out of the place in which it is and put into the place where it is not, which is impossible because all things must always be in the places where they are.

Universals cannot become particulars and particulars cannot become universals, but universals exist according to degrees and particulars exist according to conditions.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

If the future and the past really exist, where are they?

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.

If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is "How should I know?"… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?

The doers are much more enlightened in faith than the speculative, as even the philosopher says in his Metaphysics,75 that an experienced person acts more surely.

In this connection, unlike their Christian counterparts, Hindus are not disturbed with anavasth? (infinite regresses). The necessity to posit a "first cause" that had no previous cause, as the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas suggested, does not appear on the Hindu radar. So there are some metaphysical questions that are neither asked nor answered by Hindus.

Everything is science and everything is philosophy.

What is Philosophy? The domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).

For me, philosophy consists in giving another name to what has long been crystallized under the name of God.

there is no metaphysically neutral starting point from which science can lift itself up by its own intellectual bootstraps.

The relation of science to metaphysics and theology is not fundamentally a scientific question, nor is it fundamentally an empirical, historical, sociological, or even philosophical question, though of course it is all of these. Rather it is fundamentally a theological question, logically consequent upon the question of the relation between God and the world.

Metaphysical judgments are inherent in what counts as empirical evidence, and these judgments mediate between science and theology proper.