Top 100 Quotes About Metaphysics
#1. Metaphysics, in my understanding, is the unity of knowledge and the meaning and orientation this unity gives to life. If this unity is the unity of knowledge, how can it be all that subjective? It is a faith grounded in knowledge.
Fazlur Rahman
#2. People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.
G.K. Chesterton
#3. There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.
Koren Zailckas
#5. Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject object metaphysics that dominates present social thought
Robert M. Pirsig
#6. The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.
Iain McGilchrist
#8. The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.
Gilles Deleuze
#9. Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
Jacques Maritain
#10. Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment.
"Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals" (1785)
Immanuel Kant
#11. The knife of historical relativism ... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#12. Fate forced me to become a two-man woman. But there was no effing way I could be a four-man woman.
Even metaphysics couldn't keep that from being whorey.
Sierra Dean
#13. When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
Shailer Mathews
#14. The business and design of the Royal Society is: To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all useful Arts, Manufactures, Mechanic practices, Engines and Inventions by Experiments-(not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetoric or Logick).
Robert Hooke
#15. Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
Jorge Luis Borges
#16. There's enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything.
Fernando Pessoa
#17. Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily.
Bertrand Russell
#18. Laughter is the real religion. Everything else is just metaphysics.
Rajneesh
#19. I teach metaphysics and pastor a church.
Della Reese
#20. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
#21. Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature.
Nikolai Berdyaev
#22. It's progress I think, that science has joined philosophy, metaphysics & religion as subjects drunk people argue about in bars.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#23. Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.
Immanuel Kant
#24. What's impossible to all humanity may be possible to the metaphysics and physiology of angels.
Joseph Glanvill
#25. In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry Eagleton
#26. Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
William James
#27. We get ourselves in trouble because it's a cheap way to get attention. Trouble is a faux form of fame. It's easier to get busted in the bedroom with the faculty chairman's wife than it is to finish that dissertation on the metaphysics of motley in the novellas of Joseph Conrad.
Steven Pressfield
#28. 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.
Edward Abbey
#29. I believe in metaphysics. I don't believe in God because I think that is a human simplification of the things we can't explain. But I believe in a greater universe.
Jochen Zeitz
#30. Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#33. A system of philosophy, or metaphysics, is a union of a world view and a life view in one harmonious, complete, integral conception. In so far as any man strives to attain, by rational inquiry, a consistent and comprehensive view of life and reality, he is a metaphysician.
Joseph Alexander Leighton
#34. The fifth leading division of names is into relative and absolute, or let us rather say, relative and non-relative; for the word absolute is put upon much too hard duty in metaphysics, not to be willingly spared when its services can be dispensed with.
John Stuart Mill
#35. Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly.
Swami Sivananda
#36. The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi.
Emmanuel Levinas
#37. If you're trained in metaphysics, you don't see the world as distinct from yourself. You are one with the world.
Marianne Williamson
#38. Women in love are pathetic
and I cannot be bothered, for now,
I am back to metaphysics
and my armpits gather hair.
Mie Hansson
#39. Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.
David Mitchell
#40. The psychic is a phenomenal world in itself, which can be reduced neither to the brain nor to metaphysics.
C. G. Jung
#41. Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age.
J.L. Austin
#42. The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science.'
Dan Brown
#43. The distinctive contribution that metaphysics makes to our understanding of reality is first that it considers questions about features of reality that the sciences don't, such as the intrinsic nature of causation or the dynamic character of temporal experience.
L.A. Paul
#44. The bible is a source of great inspiration to me. It is a textbook of metaphysics. Within the bible are keys to personal growth, and lessons in personal actualization. The bible is a spiritual masterpiece.
John Fante
#45. Hence, in shorthand, the meaning of a statement is the injunction of its enactment. No injunction, no enactment, no meaning. That is, mere metaphysics.
Ken Wilber
#47. Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#48. In fact the Kabbalah rests upon the exoteric Judeo-Christian tradition. It consists of metaphysics and philosophy, from which can be drawn a mystical way, which is applied and regulated through personal asceticism.
Robert Ambelain
#49. No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.
Alfred North Whitehead
#50. The demarcation between science and metaphysics is determined by the limits of experiential inquiry, not Nature or God
Alan Wallace
#51. Metaphysics,
the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#52. God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven.
George MacDonald
#53. Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.
Joseph Wood Krutch
#54. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
Antonin Artaud
#55. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
Robert M. Pirsig
#56. With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
#58. When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
Voltaire
#59. He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity.
Maimonides
#60. I'm not looking to be a trophy. When not acting, I spend my time studying metaphysics and quantum mechanics to keep my life as grounded as I can.
Tanit Phoenix
#61. Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
Fernando Pessoa
#62. Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.
Ameen Rihani
#63. The biggest question, transcending physics and the realm of how he was able to do the extraordinary things he did, remained firmly rooted in the realm of metaphysics and begged an answer to why he could do these things.
Sol Luckman
#64. That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it.
Boris Pasternak
#65. That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy.
Frederick C. Beiser
#66. In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician's ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that was mistaken in metaphysics and theory of knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
#67. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her, as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday.
Louisa May Alcott
#68. Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.
David Bentley Hart
#69. Logic has its use and metaphysics has its use, but neither of them is of much help in the making of a creed.
Thomas De Witt Talmage
#70. However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
Wilhelm Dilthey
#71. In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.
Immanuel Kant
#72. Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
Immanuel Kant
#73. If our previous analyses are correct, they all point to the same conclusion, that metaphysical adventures are doomed to fail when their authors substitute the fundamental concepts of any particular science for those of metaphysics.
Etienne Gilson
#74. Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. - Stephen Toulmin
Sean Carroll
#75. Always beware of turning religion into metaphysics: Morality is its essence.
Voltaire
#76. They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy
Jorge Luis Borges
#77. For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
Charles Simic
#80. One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
James Russell Lowell
#81. I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
Woody Allen
#83. Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity.
Fernando Pessoa
#84. The argument was wilful,
The alternatives untrue,
We need no metaphysics
To sanction what we do
Or to muffle us in comfort
From what we did not do.
Louis MacNeice
#85. Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.
Aristotle.
#86. To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma.
Fulton J. Sheen
#87. Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic.
John Ray
#88. Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us.
Huston Smith
#89. Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries.
Mason Cooley
#90. 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.
Voltaire
#91. to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning - to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That
Paul Kalanithi
#93. The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood.
George Grosz
#95. He who understands baboons would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
Charles Darwin
#97. 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.
Wallace Stevens
#98. Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
George Santayana
#99. I'm a humanist. I'm an observer. I have a very scientific mind. I believe metaphysics and science absolutely blended are more the truth for me. It doesn't work just believing in what somebody says.
Meredith Brooks
#100. We are not called to proclaim philosophy and metaphysics, but the simple gospel.
Charles Spurgeon
