Ontological Quotes

#1. Subcreation is not just a desire, but a need and a right; it renews our vision and gives us new perspective and insight into ontological questions that might otherwise escape our notice within the default assumptions we make about reality.

Mark J.P. Wolf

#2. To my mind, the chief conclusion to be drawn from Derrida's analysis is that the human-animal distinction is, strictly speaking, nonsensical. How could a simple (or even a highly refined) binary distinction approach doing justice to the complex ethical and ontological matters at stake here?

Matthew Calarco

#3. The ontological concept of truth is in the centre of a logic which may serve as a model of pre- technological rationality. It is the rationality of a two-dimensional universe of discourse which, contrasts with the of thought and behavior that develop in the execution of the technological project.

Herbert Marcuse

#4. It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.

David Foster Wallace

#5. Love has been the ontological pattern for me. And also the withholding pattern.

Masha Tupitsyn

#6. For my part, I prefer the ontological argument, the cosmological argument and the rest of the old stock-in-trade, to the sentimental illogicality that has sprung from Rousseau.

Bertrand Russell

#7. Emotional, physical, and spiritual estrangement and ontological and religious doubt inform my personality, my thoughts, and my characters, which are, more often than not, masks for my own being and my being in the world - a world that frightens me insofar as I don't understand it.

Norman Lock

#8. Classical philosophical theism maintained the ontological distinction between God and creative world that is necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.

Arthur Peacocke

#9. Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this complexity possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word 'miraculous' without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.

George F. R. Ellis

#10. The societal division of labor obtains the dignity of an ontological condition.

Herbert Marcuse

#11. Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

Antonio Tabucchi

#12. Radical constructivism, thus, is radical because it breaks with convention and develops a theory of knowledge in which knowledge does not reflect an 'objective' ontological reality.

Paul Watzlawick

#13. From now on, I'm opting for ontological terrorism.

Grant Morrison

#14. The claim that there cannot be an infinite regress of contingent ontological causes raises a truly difficult challenge to pure materialism; but to imagine that it can be extended to undermine the claim that there must be an absolute ontological cause is to fall prey to an obvious category error.

David Bentley Hart

#15. Dasein itself
and this means also its Being-in-the-world
gets its ontological understanding of itself in the first instance from those entities which it itself is not but which it encounters 'within' its world, and from the Being which they possess.

Martin Heidegger

#16. There is no reason to believe that a definition necessarily determines the ontological status of the term defined.)

Karl Popper

#17. [T]he world springs out of a want, out of privation, but it is false speculation to make this privation an ontological being.

Ludwig Feuerbach

#18. Your powers of perception are astounding," the cat drawled. "Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.

Django Wexler

#19. Thus a plurality of gods could not constitute an alternative to or contradiction of the unity of God; they still would not belong to the same ontological frame of reference as he.

David Bentley Hart

#20. [Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.

Nicholas Gane

#21. Without the ontological assumption which goes with it, what is called science, is nothing but the dreamer's well-ordered dream.

George Trumbull Ladd

#22. The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.

Kate Forsyth

#23. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument.

Albert Camus

#24. I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values.

Milan Kundera

#25. A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word
'Everything'
and everyone will accept this answer as true.

Willard Van Orman Quine

#26. Ontological necessity is not a property that can intelligibly attach to any nature other than God's.

David Bentley Hart

#27. Does mathematics carry its own ontological clout?

Jim Holt

#28. Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment.

Noam Chomsky

#29. Horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And ultimately, we must face up to it: Horror is more real than we are.

Thomas Ligotti

#30. There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out
what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

Aleksandar Hemon

#31. This is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about, we are edge-walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human.

Terence McKenna

#32. How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.

Willard Van Orman Quine

#33. I emphasize in it [my Orientalism] accortdingly that neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.

Edward W. Said

#34. The mind unlearned in reverence, says Bonaventure (1221-1274), is in danger of becoming so captivated by the spectacle of beings as to be altogether forgetful of being in itself; and our mechanistic approach to the world is nothing but ontological obliviousness translated into a living tradition.

David Bentley

#35. Man's being is made of such strange stuff as to be partly akin to nature and partly not, at once natural and extranatural, a kind of ontological centaur, half immersed in nature, half transcending it.

Jose Ortega Y Gasset

#36. The genius of culture is to create an ontological system so compelling that what is inside and outside of a person are viewed as of a piece, no seams and patches noticeable.

Richard Shweder

#37. If people have multiple identities and deal with multiple realities, why should we expect them to be ontological purists?

Karl E. Weick

#38. Cut off from the intuitive knowledge of ontological reason, technical knowledge is directionless and ultimately meaningless. When it dominates, life is deprived of an experience of depth, and it tends toward despair.

Mary Daly

#39. The non-commutativity of the underlying process produces an ontological complementarity. This must be contrasted to Bohr's epistemological complementarity.

Basil Hiley

#40. The digital age is for me in many ways about temporal wounding. It's really messed up our ontological clocks.

Masha Tupitsyn

#41. Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.

Peter Kreeft

#42. When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#43. Consciousness," according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The "self" was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion.

Robert Charles Wilson

#44. The precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral.

Herbert Marcuse

#45. I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#46. Tools refer to one another to finally refer to our care for existing. In turning on a bathroom switch, we open up the entire ontological problem

Emmanuel Levinas

#47. When the sun comes up, Justineau is silently amazed. It seemed entirely plausible that this ontological impasse would go on for ever. Through

M.R. Carey

#48. For someone to be perfect, they must be real, however imperfect they are.

Johnny Rich

#49. God is a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.

Anselm Of Canterbury