Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. — Immanuel Kant
The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. — Carl Sagan
It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics. — Gabriel Marcel
Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day. — Wilhelm Dilthey
Those whose hearts are fixed on Reality itself deserve the title of Philosophers. — Plato
When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian. — Shailer Mathews
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. — Thomas Aquinas
I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a 'philosopher' simply do not have a day job to go to. — Kevin Warwick
Not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysicks, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick. — Robert Hooke
Materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants. — Thomas Nagel
I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. — Nicolaus Copernicus
The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects. — Pierre Bourdieu
Men who are lovers of wisdom [i.e., philosophers] must be inquirers into many things. — Heraclitus
Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. — Alfred North Whitehead
The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge. — Plato
Short Metaphysicians Quotes
Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. — Rudolf Carnap
The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper. — Edward Dahlberg
Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make. — Gaston Bachelard
Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories. — Aldous Huxley
No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful. — Charles Caleb Colton
Metaphysic Quotes
Art alone makes life possible - this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms...
Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done. — Joseph Beuys
THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two. — Ken Wilber
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
Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. — Auguste Comte
Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is. — Martha Beck
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth. — Mahatma Gandhi
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
Whenever I see an erring man, I say to myself I have also erred; when I see a lustful man I say to myself, so was I once; and in this way I feel kinship with everyone in the world and feel that I cannot be happy without the humblest of us being happy. — Mahatma Gandhi
Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science. — Karl Popper
Metaphysical Quotes
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. — Alan Watts
Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics. — Karl Kraus
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
Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time. — Arnold J. Mandell
Unfortunately, half the boats were lost in a great storm at sea, and many members of the six boats that did make it to their destinations safely, were later killed by the very native people to whom they sought to transmit their knowledge of the Atlantean sciences, arts and metaphysics. — Frederick Lenz
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
The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. — Sam Harris
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. — Karl Marx
Mankind is notoriously too dense to read the signs that God sends from time to time. We require drums to be beaten into our ears, before we should wake from our trance and hear the warning and see that to lose oneself in all, is the only way to find oneself. — Mahatma Gandhi
Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil. — Albert Camus
When we begin to see each other through what the metaphysician calls, the third eye, we begin to know each other on a level that is beyond what our physical eyes can see. — Marianne Williamson
Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence. — Herbert Spencer
There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. — George Macdonald
A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. — William James
A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men. — H. L. Mencken
The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts. — H. L. Mencken
The Yankees, the first mechanicians in the world, are engineers - just as the Italians are musicians and the Germans metaphysicians - by right of birth. Nothing is more natural, therefore, than to perceive them applying their audacious ingenuity to the science of gunnery. — Jules Verne
I think, in fact, that the connections between philosophy and cognitive science haven't gone far enough, metaphysicians should be working closely with cognitive scientists when they try to understand the sources of our experience of parts of the world such as its causal and temporal parts. — L.A. Paul
Often the features metaphysicians are interested in, like causation, time, and essence, involve features that seem so basic or are so generally embedded in the way we experience the world that it takes special attention and focus to draw them out and develop an account of their nature. — L.A. Paul
Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists. — L.A. Paul
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
I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them! — Swami Vivekananda
There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians.... Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods? — Jack London
Metaphysicians tell us that it is easier to get the body well than to get the mind to realize its wellness. — Alice Hegan Rice
No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is. — Evelyn Underhill
Metaphysicians have been learning their lessons for the last four thousand years, and it is high time that they should now begin to teach us something. Can any of the tribe inform us why all the operations of the mind are carried on with undiminished strength and activity in dreams, except the judgment, which alone is suspended and dormant? — Charles Caleb Colton
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
I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world. — Marshall McLuhan
It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child. — Jim Holt
Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body. — Charles Caleb Colton
The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it. — Edward Abbey
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