Quotes About Metaphysics

Perhaps he would have gone in the direction I'm now about to go in if this second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical wave, had finally grounded out where I'll be grounding it out, that is, in the everyday world. I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. But unfortunately for him it didn't ground out. It went into a third mystical wave of crystallization from which he never recovered.

Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought

And because without objects there can be no subject-- because the objects create the subject's awareness of himself-- quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible.

To these internal pressures we are gracefully adding by direct encouragement, the rigour of a nationalism based in a fanatical religion. I personally admire it, but never forget that it is a fighting religion with no metaphysics, only an ethic.

We call metaphysics the Science of Life, because to know pure metaphysics is to renew the life and make death and accident impossible.

It is not possible for form to do without matter because it is not separable, nor can matter itself be purged of form.

Metaphysics is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance. ... And here we will have the science to study that which is, both in its essence and in the properties which it has.

What is is what must be.

[Plato] was the first to envisage the idea of timeless existence and to emphasize it-against reason-as a reality, more [real] than our actual experience.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is Metaphysics.

We, on the other hand, must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion.

If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics.

Frege has the merit of ... finding a third assertion by recognising the world of logic which is neither mental nor physical.

Scientists say that the theory of everything is a technical expression, not a metaphysical one.

Ontological priority is normatively neutral, Plato to the contrary notwithstanding.

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don't know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it's ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

It's not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics.

So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world.

america as much a problem in metaphysics as it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our galaxy an organism that changes even as i examine it fact and fantasy never twice the same so many variables

Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions.