Quotes & Sayings About Philosophical Thinking

Indeed, whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. Thus any attempt to write on Zen may seem an absurdity from the beginning, but that is only so if either reader or writer imagines that Zen can be contained in a set of ideas. A book about London is in no sense London itself, and no sane person would dream of thinking that it is. Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason. There — Alan W. Watts

I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done. — Aleksandar Hemon

So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think "of course it's that way, why would it be any other way?" It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve. — Jonathan Ive

People habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them. Thus by use they become satisfied merely with seeing what is said, without going any further. Review and attention, and even forming a judgment, becomes fatigue; and to lay anything before them that requires it, is putting them quite out of their way. — Joseph Butler

If you think like others, how can you be sure you're thinking at all? — Daniel Delgado F.

Solitude led to retrospective thinking, and if the past is what you are trying to get away from, then constant distractions in the present are needed. — R.D. Ronald

I just realized, sometime early on in college, that I wanted to be a philosopher. I basically decided that I wanted to spend my life thinking as deeply and carefully and reflectively as I could about the nature of reality and our human engagement with it, and that taking a philosophical approach was the best way to go about doing this. — L.A. Paul

What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Nothing is as it seems, but something is everything it is made out to be. — Carroll Bryant

In terms of political things, I think it's important to be more direct in terms of political statements. I think in terms of philosophical and things that you plant things and see them grow lyrically or musically, it's okay to be subtle. — Serj Tankian

I suppose belief is there to prevent people from thinking. — Gasmaskman

I can't understand how people can settle for having just one life. I remember we were in English class and we were talking about that poem by - that one guy. David Frost. 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood-' You know this poem, right? 'Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth-"
"I loved that poem. But I remember thinking to myself: Why? How come you can't travel both? That seemed really unfair to me. — Dan Chaon

I should like to begin with a philosophical comment. I do not think that when one is speaking of hardships or benefits one can reasonably speak in terms of classes or social groups but only in terms of individuals. — John James Cowperthwaite

There are signs, these days, that the cultural hegemony of postmodernism is weakening in the West. When even the developers tell an architect like Moshe Safdie that they are tired of it, then can philosophical thinking be far behind? — David Harvey

Countering the juggernaut of formalism is a minority worldview of equal historical standing, even though it does not share equal awareness or popularity. Variously known as hermeneutics, constructivism, interpretationalism, and most recently postmodernism, this tradition has consistently challenged almost everything advanced by the formalists. Iterative development practices, including XP, and object thinking are consistent with the hermeneutic worldview. Unfortunately, most object, XP, and agile practitioners are unaware of this tradition and its potential for providing philosophical support and justification for their approach to software development. — David West

With respect to ingenious subconsciousness, I think, philosophers might well rival poets. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

receptiveness which promises a revolution both in philosophical and in religious thinking; here they are filtering in through many indirect influences, there slowly pouring through direct and open channels. There is hardly a — Sri Aurobindo

A work of art can start you thinking about some aesthetic or philosophical problem; it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction. — Francine Prose

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination? — Jane Campion

When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle. — Max Horkheimer

Maximoff." His deep voice pitches me from a fantasy.
I lift my eyes.
He smiles.
"What?" I combat.
Farrow bends a knee. "Are you thinking about the philosophical meaning of the world or are you thinking about fucking me in the ass? — Krista Ritchie

I do think you have sort of a general philosophical approach that you want from a justice, and I think a strict constructionist would be probably the way I'd describe it. — Rudy Giuliani

Think I'll flip a coin, I'm a winner either way Mmmmmm, I feel lucky today — Mary Chapin Carpenter

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour. — Ray Bradbury

Teaching Plato in Palestine shows how philosophical thinking can illuminate important topics-in particular, the problem of finding ways to engage people with opposed ideologies in fruitful debate. The lively narratives, based on the author's experiences of working with various groups interested in using philosophical tools to clarify their thought and action, will engage a wide range of readers. — Gary Gutting

The Big Book's chapter We Agnostics draws a line in the sand: God either is or He isn't. What was our choice to be (Alcoholics Anonymous, 53)? Nature abhors a vacuum and a state of nothing can't exist in either the material or spiritual world. This kind of binary thinking made sense in the autocratic world of 1939. But in a democratic, pluralist society, all-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion - a philosophical assumption that everything is right or wrong, good or evil, superior or inferior. In this millennium, people can hold opposing views and be equals in the same community. Our Traditions, lovingly and tolerantly, make room for more than one truth. That's a good thing, because the only problem with the truth is that there are so many versions of it. — Joe C.

If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience once more would be banal and Sisyphean - even if it did build muscle - whereas to wish to be young again and to have the benefit of one's learned and acquired existence is not at all to wish for a repeat performance, or a Groundhog Day. And the mind ought to, but cannot, set some limits to wish-thinking. All right, same me but with more money, an even sturdier penis, slightly different parents, a briefer latency period ... the thing is absurd. I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman, but like blind Tiresias would also want the option of re-metamorphosing if I wished. How terrible it is that we have so many more desires than opportunities. — Christopher Hitchens

I saw a muskrat come out of a hole in the ice ... While I am looking at him, I am thinking what he is thinking of me. He is a different sort of man, that's all. — Henry David Thoreau

One cannot, therefore, understand Arabic science without considering the extent to which Islam influenced scientific and philosophical thought. Arabic science was, throughout its golden age, inextricably linked to religion. Clearly, the scientific revolution of the Abbasids would not have taken place if it were not for Islam, incontrast to the spread of Christianity over the preceding centuries, which had nothink like the same effect in stimulation and encouraging original scientific thinking. — Jim Al-Khalili

Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and many more great minds laid the groundwork for the development of modern science. Over the foundation of philosophy, history witnessed the daring ventures of human excellence by both philosophical and scientific geniuses, such as Leonardo-da-Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Darwin, Newton and so on. And the chain of reaction they triggered with their extraordinarily abnormal thinking, given their surrounding ignorance and fundamentalism, resulted into the evolution of our modern science. — Abhijit Naskar

Whenever you're talking about meaning, basically ... I think a lot of the human experience has to do with trying to understand what things mean, and there's not really any tools to do that unless you're thinking about it in a more spiritual or philosophical realm. — Win Butler

[...] So large was the universe of things called Oriental: roots, rugs, religions, noodles, hairstyles, hordes, healing arts, herbs and spices, fabrics, medicines, modes of war, types of astronomy, spheres of the globe, schools of philosophical thought, and salads. It applied to me, women, gum, dances, eyes, body types, chicken dishes, societies, civilizations, styles of diplomacy, codes of behaviour, fighting arts, sexual proclivities, and a particular kind of mind.
Apparently, the Orient produced people with a singular way of thinking. There was no way, wrote Jack London, for a Westerner to plumb the Oriental mind - it was cut from different cloth, functioned in an alien way. — Alex Tizon

Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects ( ... ), but it is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising the future. The more or less constant, profound and rapid momentum of change characteristic of modern institutions, coupled with structured reflexivity, mean that on the level of everyday practice as well as philosophical [Seitenwechsel] interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted. What is acceptable/appropriate/recommended behaviour today may be seen differently tomorrow in the light of altered circumstances or incoming knowledge-claims. — Anthony Giddens

The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality. — Jacques Barzun

I hope it is not necessary for me to stress the platonic nature of our relationship- not platonic in the purest sense, there was no philosophical discourse, but we certainly didn't fuck, which is usually what people mean by platonic; which I bet would really piss Plato off, that for all his thinking and chatting his name has become an adjective for describing sexless trysts. — Russell Brand

What if initially they had named you Faith and me Hope, but afterwards they forgot who of us had which name and swapped them around by mistake? You always believe that everything is going to be all right, and your faith helps me."
"And you hope that it will be that way. We have this close bond between us," and, after thinking a while, you added, "All people need hope, no one can live without it; and our hope is way stronger when it is warmed up by faith. So it isn't really important who is Faith and who is Hope; the main thing is that we are connected together. — Igor Eliseev

What I think I have in common with the school of deconstruction is the mode of negative thinking or negative awareness, in the technical, philosophical sense of the negative, but which comes to me through negative theology. — Harold Bloom

Now I do not myself share that superstitious reverence for the beliefs of common sense which many contemporary philosophers profess. But I think that we must start from them, and that we ought to depart from them only when we find good reason to do so. — C. D. Broad

The morbid thought had a power of its own that he could not control. It was not foreseen in his philosophical brand of psychology, where everything flowed neatly from consciousness and sense-perception. The professor admitted that his case was pathological, but there his thinking stopped, because it had arrived at the sacrosanct border-line between the philosophical and the medical faculty. — C. G. Jung

Orpheus never liked words. He had his music. He would get a funny look on his face and I would say what are you thinking about and he would always be thinking about music.
If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much.
But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. I was working on a new philosophical system. It involved hats.
This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.
Orpheus said the mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing. — Sarah Ruhl

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


~R. Alan Woods [2013] — R. Alan Woods

Philosophical thinking that doesn't do violence to one's settled mind is no philosophical thinking at all. — Rebecca Goldstein

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures. — John Szarkowski

Why'd you have to say that there's always someone who can do it better than I can And don't you think that I know that walkin' on water won't make me a miracle man — Elvis Costello

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am? — John Lancaster Spalding

With the abolition of otium and of the ego no aloof thinking is left ... Without otium philosophical thought is impossible, cannot be conceived or understood. — Max Horkheimer

The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn't learn it. If you learn the world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it's flat. — Ted Dekker

The process of making films is so technically demanding that it's a distraction. You don't spend your time thinking about the philosophical content, which is often very depressing. — Woody Allen

Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

No doubt, intuitions deserve respect ... [but] I think that it is always up for grabs what an intuition is an intuition of. At a minimum, it is surely sometimes up for grabs ... — Jerry Fodor

Because just as in more confused times, like today, we don't just need experts. We also need people who will think more radically to arrive at the real root of problems. So the first thing to fight for, I think, is simply to make people, the experts in certain domains, be aware of not just accepting that there are problems, but of thinking more deeply. It is an attempt to make them see more. I think it can be done. I believe this may be the main task for today: to prevent the narrow production of experts. This tendency, as I see it, is just horrible. We need, more than ever, those who, in a general way of thinking, see the problems from a global perspective and even from a philosophical perspective. — Slavoj Zizek

When we are children, people show us so many things that we lose the profound sense of seeing ... And just how could adults show us the world they have lost! They know; they think they know; they say they know ... — Gaston Bachelard

The mentality of who is your uncle - an ethnocentric way of thinking, is one of the leading causes of South Sudan's internal conflicts. — Duop Chak Wuol

The head will go round and round thinking, brooding, philosophizing; it knows only words, logic, argument. But it is very infertile; you cannot get anything out of the head as far as truth is concerned, because truth needs no logic, no argument, no philosophical research. — Osho

It takes time for change to take place. But then when huge changes are taking place, they are extraordinary. And it requires a kind of philosophical thinking, thinking in terms of epochs. — Grace Lee Boggs

The final standards do a good job of setting the bar for a more environmentally responsible kind of farming but, as perhaps was inevitable as soon as bureaucratic and industrial thinking was brought to bear, many of the philosophical values embodied in the word "organic" - the sorts of values expressed by Albert Howard - did not survive the federal rule making process. — Michael Pollan

Make thought a whirlwind. — Victor Hugo

Life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. — Julian Barnes

Writing is one way to explore new ideas and by doing so blunt the sense of personal unrest and discontent. Writing assist us recognize, explore, and accept the patent absurdity of life. Writing facilitates thinking; the reagent substances we produce through writing augment our expanding system of ideas. Writing boldly triggers a chain reaction in our philosophical structure and thus writing can operate to transform who we are. — Kilroy J. Oldster

What are you thinking?"
"Just how different everything down there is now, you know, now that I can see."
"Everything down there is exactly the same," he said. "You're the one that's different. — Cassandra Clare

The stream of thinking has enormous momentum that can easily drag you along with it. Every thought pretends that it matters so much. — Eckhart Tolle

I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions. — Kwame Anthony Appiah

To qualify as a Seeker, it was necessary to show a high serendipity factor. In my experimental behaviour pool as a child, I had exhibited such a factor, and had been selected for special training forthwith. I had taken additional courses in Philosophical, Alpha-humerals, Incidental Tetrachotomy, Apunctual Synchronicity, Homoontogenesis, and other subjects, ultimately qualifying as a Prime Esemplastic Seeker. In other words, I put two and two together in situations where other people were not thinking about addition. I connected. I made wholes greater than parts. Mine was an invaluable profession in a cosmos increasingly full of parts. — Brian W. Aldiss

The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target. — Hilary Kornblith

Not every leader is a philosopher, but each leader should cultivate a philosophical mindset. — Pearl Zhu

My activities have never had anything to do with the idea of becoming famous or achieving success. I have always been concerned with getting people to listen to me. In everything I do ... my aim is to make people listen. I want to communicate the things that I love and in which I believe, because I think that people can derive a general benefit from them. What I really want is success in a philosophical sense: I want people to grasp something of the ideas and hopes which I express in painting. — Antoni Tapies

The Lizards were extremely philosophical by nature, and often sat thinking for hours and hours together, — Oscar Wilde

When historians and literary scholars talk about the classical heritage, or the legacy to Western civilization from antiquity, they are primarily thinking of four worldviews that were written in Hebrew or Greek among the body of religious, philosophical, and literary texts created before 250 B.C. These are the Hebrew Bible, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and Hellenistic, or Alexandrine, literature. — Norman F. Cantor

Thinking is no more or no less than asking questions. To improve your thinking, improve the quality of the questions you ask. — Stephanie Mbida

It started becoming clear to me how one might have views about the nature of mind and of knowledge which are empirically informed. This way of thinking about philosophical theorizing makes sense of how philosophy might be a legitimate intellectual activity, in a way that a good deal of the armchair philosophy, I believe, cannot. — Hilary Kornblith

We are to allow one thing to be really and truly distinct from the other, to be its own genuine self. There is a logical and philosophical urge in thinking men to reduce all things to a single unity. But this urge of the natural reason tends to petrify the heart. There is no single essence to which all existing things belong, no single essence which makes all things basically one. The only true unity of created things is the unity created by love. The heart embraces all things in their great variety and the heart loves them all. — Arnold Albert Van Ruler

To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will-to-life. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life as his own. He accepts as being good: to preserve life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of the moral, and it is a necessity of thought. — Albert Schweitzer

Have some faith."
"Between faith and distrust, which one is more likely to keep you alive?"
"And which one is more likely to let you experience living?"
I threw up my hands. "Why is everything so philosophical with you?"
He shrugged. "I like thinking. — Roshani Chokshi

Listening to your own mind gives you "good reasons" why you should be fearful over unexpected events is just like being friends with someone who thinks it's funny to find new ways to hurt you! — Guy Finley

Nothing is Lie until you get to know the truth, as nothing is false in Dream until you get to know that i'm Dreamer. — The Ek

The Cubists' belief in progress was by no means complacent. They saw the new products, the new inventions, the new forms of energy, as weapons with which to demolish the old order. Yet at the same time their interest was profound and not simply declamatory. In this they differed fundamentally from the Futurists. The Futurists saw the machine as a savage god with which they identified themselves. Ideologically they were precursors of fascism: artistically they produced a vulgar form of animated naturalism, which was itself only a gloss on what had already been done in films. 35 Carlo Carra. The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. 1911 The Cubists felt their way, picture by picture, towards a new synthesis which, in terms of painting, was the philosophical equivalent of the revolution that was taking place in scientific thinking: a revolution which was also dependent on the new materials and the new means of production. — John Berger

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking. — Elliott Liu

Despite its successes, in the end, philosophical thinking always falls short of its real goal. It involves both the wonder of aspiring toward the Truth and the distress of falling short of that Truth. In this way, philosophy can be characterized as wondrous distress. — John Marmysz

Against classical philosophy: thinking about eternity or the immensity of the universe does not lessen my unhappiness. — Mason Cooley

John Duns Scotus, OFM, taught that the opposite of good was not bad but nonbeing itself. The opposite of truth was not falsity but nonbeing itself. And the opposite of unity was not multiplicity but nonbeing itself. All the opposites are all held and contained within pure being, even the finite and the infinite, matter and Spirit, male and female, etc., and this harmony between things is called beauty, which for some is a fourth transcendental itself. This worldview creates a very positive theology and anthropology based on original blessing instead of original sin. It also creates a philosophical basis for nondual thinking and the nature of evil. Evil is nonbeing and unconsciousness. Beauty is the fullness of being and full consciousness. — Richard Rohr

I am only astonished that, while so many women have intelligent things to say and so many men are still unknown, a publisher cared to print such a little book, and at such a price. That confirms what Schopenhauer reveals to us, among other truths: philosophy is a matter of death. A philosopher living and thinking life is a priori suspect in our philosophical culture. — Luce Irigaray

Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds. — Thomas Nagel

If a person sings quietly to himself on the street people smile with approval; but if he talks it's not alright; they think he's crazy. The singer is presumed to be happy and the talker unhappy ... — Edward Hoagland

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers. — Henry David Thoreau

A main cause of philosophical disease-an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them. — Alexander Nehamas

Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small. New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look. And they are sometimes found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking, considering why the world is the way that it is and whether there might be an alternative to the dominant paradigm. Rarely can they be found in the temperate latitudes between they two spaces, where we spend 99 percent of our lives. — Nate Silver

While I do not agree with all of the claims made by experimental philosophers, especially those who seem to think xphi will somehow replace the rest of philosophy, I think xphi projects are interesting and important, I love Josh Knobe's work, and that these projects contribute something new and worthwhile to the philosophical conversation. — L.A. Paul

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble
that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy. — Tim Crane

The point of a philosophical spirit is to rely primarily upon one's own thinking. — Brendan Myers

The answers lie in not just hard science or philosophical rhetoric but in experiments of the imagination as well. Human perspective must be re-examined through an almost whimsical fount of imagination of species, magic, and clear creative thinking. — Leviak B. Kelly

If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system. — Jacques Derrida

Homeric mind is ingenuity, practical intelligence. There is no Rodin-like deep thinking, no mathematical or philosophical speculation. Odysseus thinks with his hands. — Camille Paglia

That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of any thing else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity, that I believe no man, who has in philosophical matters a compentent faculty of thinking, can ever fall into it. — Isaac Newton

As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don't have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel. — David Cronenberg

In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision ... Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. 'Tragic Death of "Promising" Young Man.' ... The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' ... The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? — Julian Barnes

I think nothing is good, I really think it is. — Duop Chak Wuol