Ontologically Quotes & Sayings

Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses. — John Green

Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species. — Joseph Addison

If we base our belief systems on the humble assumption that the complexities of the world are ontologically beyond our understanding, then maybe our belief systems will make more sense and end up causing less suffering. — Moby

The true one of youth's love, proving a faithful helpmate in those years when the dream of life is over, and we live in its realities. — Robert Southey

God's story is our ontology: it explains our nature, our essence, our beginnings and our endings, our qualities, and our attributes. When we daily read our Bibles, in large chunks of whole books at a time, we daily learn that our own story began globally and ontologically. God has known us longer than anyone else has. The Bible declares that he knew us from before the foundations of the world. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

(I'd arrived after the matinee and still remember an autograph hunter at the stagedoor asking me, 'Are you anybody?' I was tempted to answer him ontologically, but instead told him a white lie, and denied my own existence.) — John Cleese

When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a break in the homogeneity of space; there is also a revelation of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center. — Mircea Eliade

Women were always ready to give themselves over for love, when all the men really had to offer them was the word and not the meaning behind it. — Bernice L. McFadden

My husband is my most ruthless critic ... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die. — Madeleine L'Engle

Now, what if Others were encapsulated in Things, in a way that Being towards Things were not ontologically severable, in Heidegger's terms, from Being towards Others? What if the mode of Dasein of Others were to dwell in Things, and so forth? In the same light, then, what if the Thing were a Dublette of the Self, and not what is called the Other? Or more radically still, what if the Self were in some fundamental way becoming a Xerox copy, a duplicate, of the Thing in its assumed essence? — Avital Ronell

We are the relationships that make us; we have our being in and through relationships that place us into reality, and therefore we are open ontologically to the possibility of encounter. — Andrew Root

Ontologically, chocolate raises profoundly disturbing questions: Does not chocolate offer natural revelation of the goodness of the Creator just as chilies disclose a divine sense of humor? Is the human born with an innate longing for chocolate? Does the notion of chocolate preclude the concept of free will? — David Augsburger

The great tendency of all persons who study techniques is to make distinctions. They distinguish between the different elements of technique, maintaining some and discarding others. They distinguish between technique and the use to which it is put. These distinctions are completely invalid and show only that he who makes them has understood nothing of the technical phenomenon. Its parts are ontologically tied together; in it, use is inseparable from being. — Jacques Ellul

A young man's passion, a jaded siren's last chance for love, a world gone mad, cheap thrills, fast cars, expensive wines, the triumph of victory, the overthrow of ontologically incipient hegemony, and gum! I have no idea if this book has any of them! But I liked the part about the bunny. — Esther M. Friesner

I mention the library only as a last resort. I recommend buying your own books... They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself. — Kato Lomb

Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

The unavoidable conclusion that, precisely because God and creation are ontologically distinct in the manner of the absolute and the contingent, they are morally indiscerptible.
(from Radical Orthodoxy 3.1 (2015): 1-17) — David Bentley Hart

One of the great intellectual mistakes Einstein made is that he thought that space and time are physically or ontologically entangled. In the present non-spatial universal computational program, space and time happen to be entangled to the extent that, under certain unique circumstances, changes in spatial measurements indicate changes in temporal ones. However, a change in the program itself may cause space and time to disentangle. — Kedar Joshi

If the universe is a non-spatial computer, a 'time machine' is a program that allows a user to have the same (ontologically non-spatial) feelings or experiences that occurred or s/he merely feels to have occurred in the past, with an in-built function to have different feelings or experiences than those of the past, and thus creating a possibility to change the past or to rewrite history in a pseudo sense. — Kedar Joshi

It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures. — John Green

Yet the most pervasive error one encounters in contemporary arguments about belief in God - especially, but not exclusively, on the atheist side - is the habit of conceiving of God simply as some very large object or agency within the universe, or perhaps alongside the universe, a being among other beings, who differs from all other beings in magnitude, power, and duration, but not ontologically, and who is related to the world more or less as a craftsman is related to an artifact. — David Bentley Hart

Knowledge means rising above immediacy, beyond self, into the foreign and distant. The object of such knowledge is inherently vulnerable to scrutiny; the object is a 'fact' which, if it develops, changes, or otherwise transforms itself in the way that civilizations frequently do, nevertheless is fundamentally, even ontologically stable. To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. — Edward Said

War is wonderful. They'll never stamp it out. It's one of the few times people can act their best. It's so economical in terms of gesture and motion, every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother. — Leonard Cohen

as technology expands the reach of mind, a comprehension of what it actually is and ontologically designs diminishes. — Tony Fry

The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious. — Esther Perel

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, 'natural' ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope. — Hannah Arendt

Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation was a big place. — Ernest Cline

What I remember most is the searing sensation of looking into her eyes for the first time,eyes that would hunt me for the rest of my life — Jonathan Hull

By exerting its will, Descartes declared, the immaterial human mind could cause the material human machine to move. This bears repeating, for it is an idea that, more than any other, has thrown a stumbling block across the path of philosophers who have attempted to argue that the mind is immaterial: for how could something immaterial act efficaciously on something as fully tangible as a body? Immaterial mental substance is so ontologically different-that is, such a different sort of thing-from the body it affects that getting the twain to meet has been exceedingly difficult. To be sure, Descartes tried. He argued that the mental substance of the mind interacts with the matter of the brain through the pineal gland, the organ he believed was moved directly by the human soul. The interaction allowed the material brain to be physically directed by the immaterial mind through what Descartes called "animal spirits"-basically a kind of hydraulic fluid. — Jeffrey M. Schwartz