Philosophical Reflection Quotes & Sayings

This is Nature - the balance of colossal forces ... the mighty Cosmos in perfect equilibrium produces - this ... sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted ... why should he run about here and there, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?
from Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad

Let the morrow bring on what it would, he thought, for it didn't exist. Only now could lay any claim to forever ... — Tim Willocks

It occurred to him now to ask himself if this was how it happened : was it possible that the mere fact of using one's hands and investing one's attention in someone other than oneself, created a pride and tenderness that had nothing whatever to do with the response of the object of one's care - just as a craftsman's love for his handiwork is in no way diminished by the fact of it being unreciprocated? — Amitav Ghosh

Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek. — R.D. Ronald

Birth pushes, death pulls; only you can slow the time between. — Jack Sanger

She gave me a philosophical lecture ala "Course in Miracles", where reality is a reflection of one's attitude and expectations. — Mark Heying

Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news - the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers - at great cost to the rest of your life. — John Irving

Nature has endowed the human with A HEART to detect the sensibility of
feelings and A WEIRD MIND to contemplate ... so be A REAL HUMAN BEING. — Ghumakkad Agantuk Ram

No one can steal your freedom from you. You can only give it away. — Bella James

Even the brightest magnesium flare can do little against such dark except blind the eyes of the one holding it. Thus one craves what by seeing one has in fact not seen. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Philosophical reflection could not leave the relation of mind and spirit in the obscurity which had satisfied the needs of the naive consciousness. — Wilhelm Wundt

There are many subjects upon which, if we hold an opinion at all, we should hold it tentatively, waiting for more light, and retaining a willingness to be enlightened. Many a bitter and fruitless quarrel might be avoided, if more persons found it possible to maintain this philosophical attitude of mind. Philosophy is, after all, reflection, and the reflective man must realize that he is probably as liable to error as are other men. He is not infallible, nor has the limit of human knowledge been attained in his day and generation. He who realizes this will not assume that his neighbor is always wrong, and he will come to have that wide, conscientious tolerance, which is not indifference, but which is at the farthest remove from the zeal of mere bigotry. — George Stuart Fullerton

Be not afraid life with all its despair, pain and unhappiness is just a crucible wherein your brighter dreams are conceived, shaped and born — Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

No thought,no reflection,no analysis,no cultivation,no intention;let it settle itself.Relax "Tilopa — Tilopa

Pets reflect you like mirrors. When you are happy, you can see your dog smiling and when you are sad, your cat cries. — Munia Khan

Mental reflection os so much more interesting than tv [that]it's a shame more people don't switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant, but it never is. — Robert M. Pirsig

The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time. — R.D. Ronald

It is an animus, she decides, the representation of the Logos in the female, as the anima is the representation of Eros in the male. In its negative aspect it is opinionated, conventional, banal, self-righteous, argumentative ... In its positive aspect, it conveys spirit, feistiness, the capacity for reflection and self-knowledge, the capacity to handle philosophical and religious ideas at the higher levels. — Michael Gruber

Ensconced in our finite spaces,
We think we are at the helm of justice:
Degrading people's minutest of affairs. — Taranum

An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled. — Jonathan Safran Foer

My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's."


~R. Alan Woods [2013] — R. Alan Woods

To know oneself is a journey that requires a beginning — Jack Sanger

Philip Kitcher has composed the most formidable defense of the secular view of life since Dewey. Unlike almost all of contemporary atheism, Life After Faith is utterly devoid of cartoons and caricatures of religion. It is, instead, a sober and soulful book, an exemplary practice of philosophical reflection. Scrupulous in its argument, elegant in its style, humane in its spirit, it is animated by a stirring aspiration to wisdom. Even as I quarrel with it I admire it. — Leon Wieseltier

It is not what we know that scares us, it is what we do not — A.G. Phillips

I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence? — James Thomson

Who am I? What am I doing here? Who are these others? This trilogy of spiritual conundrums is as practical as it is philosophical. Mindful inquiry devoted to these three questions is as spiritual as it is material and as obvious as it is unanswerable. Knowledge isn't to comfort our souls; it is to enhance awareness - that is what some call an awakening. Some things have to be believed to be seen. Feelings articulate truth in ways that our brains cannot. We may have a sense about who we are, what our purpose is and how we relate to the rest of the world even without the vocabulary to articulate it. Recovery is visceral as much as it is intellectual. The Eleventh Step is our spiritual barometer, feeding back sensations, feelings and thoughts as we observe our life. — Joe C.

There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness — Sophocles

It is indeed a curse to dream as you walk amongst the dreamless — Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

Deciding to wait, Scott sat down with a pint away from the bar at a corner table and lit a cigarette. The clientele in there on Sunday afternoon were the same as most other afternoons. From middle-aged to old men, drinking and cursing at the world like it was the last bus which had just left the stop without them. — R.D. Ronald

The process of philosophizing, to my mind, consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite, which by reflection and analysis we find is involved in the vague thing that we start from, and is, so to speak, the real truth of which that vague thing is a sort of shadow. — Bertrand Russell

But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. — Michel Foucault

When history seems to offer no sanctuary for values (when history is assailed by wars and inhuman or immoral public actions), literature can provide a model, often as horrendous as that of history, but one which by virtue of its fictional nature is bound to keep an ironic, parodic, aesthetic or philosophical distance from what is at risk in immediate experience or direct reflection. — Beatriz Sarlo

An amorous night is to approach a state of perfection that only two lovers can reach; you see this requires--no it demands, implores the deepest reverence, trust, insatiable desire, and mad lust for her. To worship her by abolishing the weakness of fear, the fear of betrayal, infidelity, the lack of reciprocation and bequeathing the body and soul to her, to worship her, to yearn and gain her unfettered permission to her body and soul, to accept the primal desires the animal needs that dwell inside, yet to have passion, tender love-making and violent sex all in the same night, as one--approaching this perfection is approaching heaven on earth. — Jack Serv

I have got only one life to live and one death to die; there better be a good cause to live and a good cause to die. — Surendra Nath

Cesar is not a philosophical man. His life has been one long flight from reflection. At least he is clever enough not to expose the poverty of his general ideas; he never permits the conversation to move toward philosophical principles. Men of his type so dread all deliberation that they glory in the practice of the instantaneous decision. They think they are saving themselves from irresolution; in reality they are sparing themselves the contemplation of all the consequences of their acts. Moreover, in this way they can rejoice in the illusion of never having made a mistake; for act follows so swiftly on act that it is impossible to reconstruct the past and say that an alternative decision would have been better. They can pretend that every act was forced on them under emergency and that every decision was mothered by necessity — Thornton Wilder

Words and form! We have a totally clear view of the world when we're fourteen years old, maybe sooner. But then we need another fifty years in order to create a language that can express those impressions. And in the mean time, of course, they've faded away. — Hakan Nesser

I have begun to wonder where I came from. The person I am now, this fumbling, stumbling supplicant ... was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank state? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent. Am I firmly rooted to what came before? Or can I choose to deviate? — Isaac Marion

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities - we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities. — Richard Feldman

There is an example that inspires a matter for debate. Was the pattern always there for us to find or do we create it entirely by ourselves from nothing? — Philip Dodd

Man is made by his beliefs.
As he believes, so he is. — Anonymous

Frustration is having a debate with a blind man on shades of red — Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

Even those novelists most commonly deemed "philosophical" have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an "austere, unselfish, candid" prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something "mysterious, ambiguous, particular" about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. "If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships," she said. "And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy. — Iris Murdoch