Metaphysical Quotes - Page 13

• Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

  Ntozake Shange

  Women, Feminist, African American

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• My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.

  Robert M. Price

  Cheerleading, Emotional, Wind

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• We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them because we are looking with them.

  Michael Polanyi

  Believe, Dwelling, Looks

  Michael Polanyi, Harry Prosch (2008). “Meaning”, p.61, University of Chicago Press

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• The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning" of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Soul, Solitude, Secret

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.71, Beacon Press

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• You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Christian, Problem, Materialism

  "Paul's Letter to American Christians". Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 4, 1956.

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• Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Drama, Oratory, Delay

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• By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.

  Josiah Royce

  Mean, Unique, Class

  Josiah Royce (1952). “The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown”

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• In writing Snowboarding to Nirvana I have intentionally written an inspirational spiritual adventure story, which will hopefully provide people with metaphysical techniques, spiritual knowledge, hope and a brighter view of life.

  Frederick Lenz

  Spiritual, Writing, Adventure

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• Life is an energy field, a bunch of molecules. And these particular molecules formed to make these four guys, who then formed into this band called the Beatles and did all that work. I have to think that was something metaphysical. Something alchemic. Something that must be thought of as magic.

  Paul McCartney

  Thinking, Guy, Magic

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• Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.

  Dave Hickey

  Real, Believe, Men

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• Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!

  Brion Gysin

  Running, Nuts, Feet

  Brion Gysin (2015). “Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader”, p.174, Wesleyan University Press

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• What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices.

  Richard A. Falk

  Capitalist Economy, Practice, Understanding

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?

  Jasper Johns

  Fall, Kind, Clue

  "Jasper Johns, Writings, sketchbook Notes, Interviews". Book edited by Kirk Varnedoe and Christel Hollevoet, 1996.

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• The idea of buddha mind is not purely a concept or a theoretical, metaphysical idea. It is something extremely real that we can experience ourselves. In fact, it is the ego that feels that we have an ego. It is ego that tells us, My ego is bothering me. I feel very self-conscious about having to be me. I feel that I have a tremendous burden in me, and I wonder what the best way to get rid of it is. Yet all those expressions of restlessness that keep coming out of us are the expression of buddha nature: the expression of our unborn, unobstructed, and nondwelling nature.

  Chogyam Trungpa

  Real, Ideas, Self

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• I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

  Isaac Newton

  Philosophy, Science, Quality

  Letter to Robert Hooke, 5 Feb. 1676

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• It's also one of these strange points where metaphysics converges with economy. Because really what the experts are doing is creating value by banishing doubt. All great dead painters basically have this one person, this expert who has the metaphysical power to grant a seal of authenticity.

  Daniel Kehlmann

  Creating Value, Doubt, Experts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It is possible to be a meta-physician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience.

  A.J. Ayer

  Believe, Reality, Errors

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• Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

  David Papineau

  Mean, Identity, Use

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• One of the points where the art world is at its most metaphysical is in this weird aspect of the power of the expert. There are experts who claim they cannot be fooled because they have an inner connection to an artist and can feel whether something is genuine or fake. I've heard experts say, on panels: When it comes to my period, or my painters, I cannot be fooled. And of course that's completely ridiculous.

  Daniel Kehlmann

  Art, Fake, Connections

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

  Steven Holl

  Space, Links, Architecture

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• The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Wine, Paris, Glasses

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• In a deep metaphysical sense, all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are literally 'appearances,' the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more 'material' and solid the appearance, the further is it from reality, and therefore the more illusory it is.

  Annie Besant

  Reality, Appearance, Mask

  Annie Besant (2009). “Death - and After?”, p.70, The Floating Press

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• Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Strong, Thinking, Afterlife

  Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (Pondicherry, India), Aurobindo Ghose (1996). “Bulletin”

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• Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is.

  Martha Beck

  Angel, Shifting, Given

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• Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

  Isaac Newton

  Ideas, Diversity, Atheism

  Sir Isaac Newton (2012). “Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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