Metaphysician Quotes & Sayings

Isaac Watts, of course, is a hymn writer in the tradition of Congregationalism who lived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. He is very interesting and important because he was also a metaphysician. He knew a great deal about what was, for him, contemporary science. He was very much influenced by Isaac Newton, for example. There are planets and meteors and so on showing up in his hymns very often. But, again, the scale of his religious imagination corresponds to a very generously scaled scientific imagination. — Marilynne Robinson

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

And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. — Robert K. Dellenbach

He knew she wasn't the simple servant she pretended to be. She was too clever, too smart. She could keep pace with him - something Lucien didn't have the stamina for. — K.M. Shea

My dad was an interior design and furniture person. I started working with him for four years before my first TV writing break. — Stephen J. Cannell

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

Perhaps, after all, the greatest psychologist is not the metaphysician but the novelist. — Walter Besant

I'm often asked, 'Where do you get your ideas?' ... It's like asking, 'Where do you find air to breathe?' Ideas are all around you. — Twyla Tharp

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. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst
symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus
this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace
this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table
this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God. — George MacDonald

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

Human reason is by nature architectonic."

Critique of Pure Reason — Kant

Franklin," he said, "James — Rebecca Milton

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

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

What's happened has happened. You can't change the past. All you can do is work on making a brighter future. — Jen Calonita

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

The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. — Jack London

Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories. — Aldous Huxley

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

The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper. — Edward Dahlberg

One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable - embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak? — Henry James

He knew now the one thing of importance; and that one thing was at first there, in the drawing room, and then began moving across and came to a standstill at the door. Without turning round he felt the eyes fixed on him, and the smile, and he could not help turning round. — Leo Tolstoy

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make. — Gaston Bachelard

There's a level of service that we could provide when we're just at Harvard that we can't provide for all of the colleges, and there's a level of service that we can provide when we're a college network that we wouldn't be able to provide if we went to other types of things. — Mark Zuckerberg

Vitality, understood both somatically and mentally, is itself the medium that contains a gradient between more and less. It therefore contains the vertical component that guides ascents within itself, and has no need of additional external or metaphysical attractors. That God is supposedly dead is irrelevant in this context. With or without God, each person will only get as far as their form carries them.
Naturally 'God', during the time of his effective cultural representation, was the most convincing attractor for those forms of life and practice which strove 'towards Him' - and this towards-Him was identical to 'upwards'. Nietzsche's concern to preserve vertical tension after the death of God proves how seriously he took his task as the 'last metaphysician', without overlooking the comical aspect of his mission. He had found his great role as a witness to the vertical dimension without God. — Peter Sloterdijk

What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not. — Margaret Atwood

The only way to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing. — Edwin Arthur Burtt

If I have put the case of science at all correctly, the reader will have recognised that modern science does much more than demand that it shall be left in undisturbed possession of what the theologian and metaphysician please to term its 'legitimate field'. It claims that the whole range of phenomena, mental as well as physical-the entire universe-is its field. It asserts that the scientific method is the sole gateway to the whole region of knowledge. — Karl Pearson

The man who is ready to prove that metaphysical knowledge is wholly impossible has no right here to any answer. He must be referred for conviction to the body of this treatise. And he can hardly refuse to go there, since he himself has, perhaps unknowingly, entered the arena. He is a brother metaphysician with a rival theory of first principles. — F.H. Bradley

You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong - to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration. — Jack London

If it were possible for a metaphysician to be a golfer, he might perhaps occasionally notice that his ball, instead of moving forward in a vertical plane (like the generality of projectiles, such as brickbats and cricket balls), skewed away gradually to the right. If he did notice it, his methods would naturally lead him to content himself with his caddies's remark-'ye heeled that yin,' or 'Ye jist sliced it.' ... But a scientific man is not to be put off with such flimsy verbiage as that. He must know more. What is 'Heeling', what is 'slicing', and why would either operation (if it could be thoroughly carried out) send a ball as if to cover point, thence to long slip, and finally behind back-stop? These, as Falstaff said, are 'questions to be asked. — Peter Guthrie Tait

No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful. — Charles Caleb Colton

You can't be a good economist unless you're also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician. — Aldous Huxley

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