Quotes & Sayings About Metaphysics

Philosophy has been described as thinking about thinking, and all Christians should do that. The term comes from two Greek words, philia ("love") and sophia ("wisdom"), thus "loving wisdom." Nothing anti-Christian appears in that definition. Problems arise if we seek wisdom apart from God, or elevate human reason above Him, but according to Proverbs 4:5-7, God's people should love and seek wisdom.
Formal philosophy is divided into three major areas-incidentally, all core Christian issues: (1) Metaphysics,
which asks questions about the nature of reality: "What is real?" "Is the basic essence of the world matter, or spirit, or something else?" (2) Epistemology, which addresses issues concerning truth and knowledge: "What do we know?" "How do we know it?" "Why do we think it's true?" (3) Ethics, which considers moral problems: "What is right and wrong?" "Are moral values absolute or relative?" "What is the good life, and how do we achieve it? — Rick Cornish

If pure philosophy took any of its ideas from Christian revelation, if anything in the Bible and the Gospel has passed into metaphysics, if, in short, it is inconceivable that the system of Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz would be what in fact they are had they been altogether withdrawn from Christian influence, then it becomes, highly probable that since the influence of Christianity on philosophy was a reality, the concept of Christian philosophy is not without a real meaning. — Etienne Gilson

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign. — Mark Z. Danielewski

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. — Walt Whitman

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence. — Joseph Wood Krutch

As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life. — Diogenes Laertius

Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Metaphysical truths in their deepest sense are never "visible" to the "soul-desire"; otherwise they would immediately perfect it. The soul- desire
the man who rejoices and suffers
must therefore "believe" the truths that are evident to the Intellect. In metaphysics faith is the assent of the whole being. — Frithjof Schuon

we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever-"in the light of eternity." We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy: is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. — Will Durant

Laughter is the real religion. Everything else is just metaphysics. — Rajneesh

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

Every hour of your life that ticks by, there are numerous points and moments when you can choose to pause - and be aware of your mental and physical state. At any given point, you can freeze the flow that is your life, and be fully conscious for a moment. — Kevin Michel

Morality is totally God's standard, and his standards and conditions are revealed to us through his written word, the Scriptures (The Bible). — Reid A. Ashbaucher

The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without: to follow one's own path, not that of the crowd. — Nicholas Tharcher

At this time, the cusp of the modern age, the hinge of the nineteenth century, had a plebiscite been taken amongst all the inhabitants of the world, by far the great number of them, occupied as they were throughout the planet with daily business of agriculture of the slash and burn variety, warfare, metaphysics and procreation, would have heartily concurred with these indigenous Siberians that the whole idea of the twentieth century, or any other century at all, for that matter, was a rum notion. Had the global plebiscite been acted upon in a democratic manner, the twentieth century would have forthwith ceased to exist, the entire system of dividing up years by one hundred would have been abandoned and time, by popular consent, would have stood still. — Angela Carter

He was insane, he thought people were trying to destroy him, to suck out his guts, but, she noted, in the rare event that someone was trying to destroy you, to suck out your guts, insanity was a goodly metaphysics. — Jaimy Gordon

The energy everything is made of is conscious. It's alive. — Chris Prentiss

While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I'm not looking to be a trophy. When not acting, I spend my time studying metaphysics and quantum mechanics to keep my life as grounded as I can. — Tanit Phoenix

Don't live by my words, don't die by them, chew them slowly digest them, and smile if they give nourishment to your soul. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Only through Absolution will you reach the Absolute. — Toni Petrinovich

belief is the death of intelligence. — Robert Anton Wilson

We know that energy can not be created nor destroyed but can be changed in it's form. If it can not be formed then it can not exist. We may not exist. — Mohammed Ali

Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house. — Victor Pelevin

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. — Alfred North Whitehead

I am a gardener
I plant hearts
I have no other knowledge
No language now
Close the language door and
open the heart portal
Where everything connects as ONE. — Gabriel Iqbal

Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another. — Aberjhani

The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes. — Benjamin Disraeli

To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics. — Martin Heidegger

Knowing about your past lives is worse than useless if that knowledge doesn't bring you some kind of positive change or healing. — Lianne Downey

Logic has its use and metaphysics has its use, but neither of them is of much help in the making of a creed. — Thomas De Witt Talmage

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

The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd. — Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

...reality is always plural and mutable. — Robert Anton Wilson

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind. — Thomas Carlyle

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

The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of today, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends. — Henry Adams

For one to define and understand the nature of the universe, one must first
understand the nature of the force behind its existence. — Reid A. Ashbaucher

The page is to the story as the seed is to the flower. — Bankei Yotaku

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power. — John Adams

Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr's solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time. — Richard E. Nisbett

To understand an issue or someone's argument about anything,
one needs to understand the very nature of the issue, which is the
foundational question concerning anything. — Reid A. Ashbaucher

The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous. — William James

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct. — W. Somerset Maugham

Without forgiveness, metaphysics are useless. — Gary Renard

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Being' cannot be derived from higher concepts by definition, nor can it be presented through lower ones. But does this imply being no longer offers a problem? Not at all. We can infer only that 'Being' cannot have the character of an entity. Thus we cannot apply to Being the concept of 'definition' as presented in traditional logic, [ ... ] which, within certain limits, provides a justifiable way of characterizing 'entities'. — Martin Heidegger

All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create. — Paul Valery

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek. — Ameen Rihani

Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. - Stephen Toulmin — Sean Carroll

My views as an individual ought not to be confused with my views as a scientist - the minute you try to mingle God and science, you get into trouble. Metaphysics has its place, and science has its place; don't mix the two. — Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

There was a metal rod inside of Colin. The rod went from his stomach to the middle of his head. It was made of steel and sugar, and had been dissolving inside of Colin for ten or fifteen years, slow and sweet, above and behind his tongue; and he could taste it in that way, like an aftertaste, removed and seeping and outside of the mouth. Sometimes he'd glimpse it with the black, numb backs of his eyes. But what he really wanted was to wrench it out. Cut it up and chew it. Or melt it. Bathe in the hard, sweet lava of it. — Tao Lin

What's impossible to all humanity may be possible to the metaphysics and physiology of angels. — Joseph Glanvill

The argument was wilful,
The alternatives untrue,
We need no metaphysics
To sanction what we do
Or to muffle us in comfort
From what we did not do. — Louis MacNeice

I shall never find a better document for a phenomenology of a being which is at once established in its roundness and developing in it. Rilke's tree propagates in green spheres a roundness that is a victory over accidents of form and the capricious events of mobility. Here becoming has countless forms, countless leaves, but being is subject to no dispersion: If I could ever succeed in grouping together all the images of being, all the multiple, changing images that, in spite of everything, illustrate permanence of being, Rilke's tree would open an important chapter in my album of concrete metaphysics. — Gaston Bachelard

If being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like — Zeno Of Citium

All the power
in the
Cosmos
Exists
Inside You
Seek it not elsewhere. — Gabriel Iqbal

Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing? — Martin Heidegger

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it. — Lawrence M. Krauss

What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) — Stephen Batchelor

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. — H.L. Mencken

No matter how you arrive at the awareness and belief that you've lived before and will live again, the most lasting healing benefit will be the change in your attitude. You are creating your future lives right at this moment, and every moment of decision-making. — Lianne Downey

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it. — David Mitchell

The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its acts, and the majority of people, little accustomed to think, has little of it. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

What makes humans valuable in the first place? Science can't answer that question because science deals only with things we can measure empirically though the senses. If you want an answer, you'll have to do metaphysics. — Scott Klusendorf

I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people. — Arthur Schopenhauer

I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. — Robert M. Pirsig

For we find even the excellent Descartes, who gave the first impulse to subjective reflection and thereby became the father of modern philosophy, still entangled in confusions for which it is difficult to account ; and we shall soon see to what serious and deplorable consequences these confusions have led with regard to Metaphysics. — Arthur Schopenhauer

The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledge ... it would not be the source of necessary truths ... — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The appropriation of the creativity-procreativity metaphor by women is a conscious challenge to traditional poetics and beyond that to traditional metaphysics, for the gynocentric vision is not that Logos condescends to incarnate itself, but that Flesh becomes Word. — Alicia Suskin Ostriker

When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics. — Voltaire

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics. — Karl Kraus

Since science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion. — Jacques Maritain

Failure to summon forth the courage to risk a nondogmatic and nonevasive stance on such crucial existential matters can also blur our ethical vision. If our actions in the world are to stem from an encounter with what is central in life, they must be unclouded by either dogma or prevarication. Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope. — Stephen Batchelor

Deism" in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite. — Matthew Stewart

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after? — Kabir

The Bible became a jewel in the hands of the Reformers not because it was a "handbook for happy living" or a "primer of metaphysics about God," but because in it the Christian possessed the "the swaddling clothes in which Christ lies."85 — Matthew Barrett

Nor is it in fact a purely human knowledge bound by the context and categories of the human mind. Rather, metaphysics, which some of his translators render as metaphysic in order to emphasize its non-multiple but unitary nature, is the science of Ultimate Reality, attainable through the intellect and not reason, of an essentially suprahuman character and including in its fullness the whole of man's being. It is a sacred science or scientia sacra, a wisdom which liberates and which requires not only certain mental capacities but also moral and spiritual qualifications. It — Frithjof Schuon

If a supernatural being is to be exempt from natural law, it cannot possess specific, determinate
characteristics. These attributes would impose limits and these limits would restrict the capacities
of this supernatural being. In this case, a supernatural being would be subject to the causal
relationships that mark natural existence, which would disqualify it as a god. Therefore, we must
somehow conceive of a being without a specific nature, a being that is indeterminate - a being, in
other words, that is nothing in particular. But these characteristics (or, more precisely, lack of
characteristics) are incompatible with the notion of existence itself. — George H. Smith

If our previous analyses are correct, they all point to the same conclusion, that metaphysical adventures are doomed to fail when their authors substitute the fundamental concepts of any particular science for those of metaphysics. — Etienne Gilson

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead. — Scarlett Thomas

The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy. — Joseph Alexander Leighton

One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism. — Russ Shafer-Landau

Q. But it seems to me there are circumstances that simply induce one to have negative emotions!
A. This is one of the worst illusions we have. We think that negative emotions are produced by circumstances, whereas all negative emotions are in us, inside us. This is a very important point. We always think our negative emotions are produced by the fault of other people or by the fault of circumstances. We always think that. Our negative emotions are in ourselves and are produced by ourselves. There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason why somebody else's action or some circumstance should produce a negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness. No negative emotion can be produced by external causes if we do not want it. We have negative emotions because we permit them, justify them, explain them by external causes, and in this way we do not struggle with them. — P.D. Ouspensky

The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics. — Maimonides

A witch is a woman who emerges from deep within herself. She is a woman who has honestly explored her light and learned to celebrate her darkness. She is a woman who is able to fall in love with the magnificent possibilities of her power. She is a woman who radiates mystery. She is magnetic. She is a witch. — Dacha Avelin

Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily. — Bertrand Russell

If it turns out that there is a God ... the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever. — Woody Allen

Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space. — Don DeLillo

How English you are, Basil! If one puts
forward an idea to a real Englishman, - always a rash
thing to do, - he never dreams of considering whether the
idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any
importance is whether one believes it one's self. Now, the
value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the
sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the
probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it
will not be colored by either his wants, his desires, or his
prejudices. However, I don't propose to discuss politics,
sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better
than principles. Tell me more about Dorian Gray. How
often do you see him? — Oscar Wilde

Become nothing...
hurry .... dissolve ...
end the fire ...
Drown in the ocean of love...
Disintegrate...
Become like water
No even lighter
Ethereal Vapour
Bellow across the hearts
Embalm spirits
Create Bliss. — Gabriel Iqbal

There is so much more than we can see, there is so much more that we can be. — Tom Kenyon M.A.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. — G.K. Chesterton

One can never "fall" in love, you must rise to it's level of consciousness. Love is not a feeling, it's a state of MIND! — T.C. Carrier

The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. — Emmanuel Levinas

If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics. — Pierre Duhem

Authenticity is not a metaphysically distinctive way of being human; it is just a way of taking responsibility for what one has already been given. — Peter E. Gordon

For human reason, without any instigations imputable to the mere vanity of great knowledge, unceasingly progresses, urged on by its own feeling of need, towards such questions as cannot be answered by any empirical application of reason, or principles derived therefrom; and so there has ever really existed in every man some system of metaphysics. — Immanuel Kant

A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide into the smallest event. This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rumbling past. It makes reality come true. — Don DeLillo

People who read mainly the Grounding and the Critique often criticize Kant for having his head in the clouds and for not being convincingly capable of dealing with concrete cases. A reading of the Metaphysics of Morals will show anyone how unfounded such criticisms are. — Immanuel Kant