Metaphysics Quotes
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In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
Terry Eagleton
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Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.
Pablo Picasso
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The concept of substance is the central tenet of Spinoza’s metaphysics. All things exist and are conceived through substance, or God, or nature, which exists and is conceived only through itself. Substance represents the singular binding force that connects things, no matter how small or disconnected in space and time they might be, for every thing participates in and is a part of a complex totality.
Elizabeth Grosz
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Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.
Aristotle
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Physics, beware of metaphysics.
Isaac Newton
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Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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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
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If you're trained in metaphysics, you don't see the world as distinct from yourself. You are one with the world.
Marianne Williamson
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The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Materialism is the metaphysics of those who refuse to be metaphysicians.
Alfred Binet
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The task of instilling Wordsworthian metaphysics into the barren intellects of the Modern Lower Fifth.
Edmund Crispin
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The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking?
Saul Bellow
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But if one decides to start with Descartes and finish with Aristotle, and to employ an idealist method while shamelessly making use of a reality one has no right to, one brings confusion into the heart of philosophy and makes its cultivation impossible. To make it possible again is the reason why realists are realists and call themselves such. They too follow a method, but they do not lay down beforehand what that method is to be, as though it were a necessary pre-condition for their philosophy. Instead, they find their method in their philosophy. So they never have to ask themselves whether it is legitimate to transform their method into a metaphysics, because their method is that metaphysics, which is fully aware of its proceedings, of its initial positions, and of their implications.
Etienne Gilson
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However, the sciences of society and of history retained their old subservient relation to metaphysics for a long time - well into the eighteenth century.
Will Yun Lee
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It’s natural to wonder whether faster sorting is even possible.
The question sounds like it’s about productivity. But talk to a computer scientist and it turns out to be closer to metaphysics—akin to thinking about the speed of light, time travel, superconductors, or thermodynamic entropy. What are the universe’s fundamental rules and limits? What is possible? What is allowed? In this way computer scientists are glimpsing God’s blueprints every bit as much as the particle physicists and cosmologists. What is the minimum effort required to make order?
Brian Christian
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The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustainedthe science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle's treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics.
Edgar Allan Poe
