Metaphysical Quotes - Page 10

• Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue

  Immanuel Kant

  Adoption, Humanity, Principles

  "Metaphysics of Morals". Book by Immanuel Kant, Part Two : Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, 1797.

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• The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe.

  Lin Yutang

  Men, Weekend, Order

  Lin Yutang (2013). “Lin Yutang - The Importance Of Living”, p.71, Read Books Ltd

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• The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Insanity, Understanding, Lapses

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• The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

  E. P. Thompson

  Real, Balance, Nuclear

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• Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

  Alan Watts

  Buddhism, Hands, Knives

  Alan Watts (2010). “What Is Zen?”, p.29, New World Library

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• In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

  Michael Behe

  Serendipity, Luck, Mutation

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• By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values.

  Ayn Rand

  Writing, Creative, Fundamentals

  Ayn Rand (2000). “The Art of Fiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers”, p.21, Penguin

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• What's more unnerving than magnetism, ghosts, and unpurified water? Gadgetmongers who purport to protect us from metaphysical monsters that go bump in the New Age night.

  Chris Hardwick

  Night, Water, Age

  "Review: Roundup: The Exorcists" by Chris Hardwick, www.wired.com. April 20, 2009.

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• To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere, it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings. A reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once.

  Antoni Tapies

  Reality, Achieve, Thorough

  "Antoni Tapies". UNESCO Courier, June 1994.

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• Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

  Bertrand Russell

  Gun, Ironclads, Arbiter

  Bertrand Russell (1994). “Philosophical Essays”, p.109, Psychology Press

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• Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Religious, Intellectual, Quality

  "Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1991.

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• 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

  Sex, Men, Differences

  Immanuel Kant (1904). “The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant”

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• One fast move or I'm gone,' I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimisn you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing Ayahuasca drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -

  Jack Kerouac

  Spiritual, Moving, Book

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• The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no 'distinct ideas' or truths, since they do not make any 'sensible difference to anybody.

  Max Horkheimer

  Dark, Thinking, Ideas

  Max Horkheimer (2013). “Eclipse of Reason”, p.31, A&C Black

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• From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.

  Stanley Hauerwas

  Suicide, Grief, Perspective

  Stanley Hauerwas (2001). “The Hauerwas Reader”, p.591, Duke University Press

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• The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.

  David Hume

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Perfect

  David Hume (1793). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.31

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• A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.

  Jerry Saltz

  Movie, Art, Algorithms

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• America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Children, America, Self

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• For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word.

  Jacques Maritain

  Love Is, Giving, Absolutes

  Jacques Maritain (2013). “The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time”, p.9, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Everyday, Use, Everyday Use

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (2010). “Philosophical Investigations”, p.129, John Wiley & Sons

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• [My first children's book] is very subliminal, let's put it that way. It even has a bit of a metaphysical little message in there [about how] we're all somehow connected and we all have a responsibility toward each other. Although you may feel alone in the world, you definitely are not.

  Gloria Estefan

  Children, Book, Responsibility

  "5 Minutes With... Gloria Estefan". Interview with Robert Dominguez, www.nydailynews.com. October 31, 2005.

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• Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Death, Children, Philosophy

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• Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'.

  Karl Popper

  Nature, Science, Men

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• I've had years of bizarre hallucinogenic magical experiences in which I believed I had communicated with entities that may well have been disassociated parts of my own personality or conceivably some independent entity of a metaphysical nature. Both would seem equally interesting.

  Alan Moore

  Independent, Years, Interesting

  "Unearthing the truth about Watchmen genius Alan Moore". Interview with Steve Rose, www.theguardian.com. July 23, 2010.

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• The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand - i.e., the metaphysics of quantum theory - is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

  Fritjof Capra

  Science, Acceptance, Successful

  "The Tao of Physics". Book by Fritjof Capra, 1975.

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