All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.”

“It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit”

“There is no key to open the heart of another – except curiosity.”

“It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.”

“The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

“This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.”

“In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.”

“In truth, Freud sees nothing and understands nothing.”

“مهما كان توجهك في الحياة حاول في كل يوم أن تبذل القليل من الجهد لقراءة المقالات أو الكتب التي تخالفك الرأي وكل ما تفعله هو توسيع مدراكك وفتح قلبك أمام الجديد من الأفكار وسيقلل هذا الإنفتاح الجديد من التوتر الذي يسببه الإبتعاد عن وجهات النظر الأخرى وهذا التمرين بالإضافة إلى كونه شائقاً سوف يساعدك على رؤية البراءة في تصرفات الغير علاوة على مساعدتك في التحلي بالمزيد من الصبر كما سيزداد استرخاؤك وتصبح إنساناً أعمق فلسفة لأنك ستبدأ بإدراك المنطق وراء وجهات النظر الأخرى.”

“Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.”

“Oh, why does compassion weaken us?’It doesn’t, really … Somewhere where it all balances out – don’t the philosophers have a name for it, the perfect place, the place where the answers live? – if we could go there, you could see it doesn’t. It only looks, a little bit, like it does, from here, like an ant at the foot of an oak tree. He doesn’t have a clue that it’s a tree; it’s the beginning of the wall round the world, to him.”

“Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.”

“I drink cup of sunlight every morning to brighten myself.”

“The ethos of redemption is realied in self-mastery, by means of temperance, that is, continence of desires.”

“Each religion makes scores of purportedly factual assertions about everything from the creation of the universe to the afterlife. But on what grounds can believers presume to know that these assertions are true? The reasons they give are various, but the ultimate justification for most religious people’s beliefs is a simple one: we believe what we believe because our holy scriptures say so. But how, then, do we know that our holy scriptures are factually accurate? Because the scriptures themselves say so. Theologians specialize in weaving elaborate webs of verbiage to avoid saying anything quite so bluntly, but this gem of circular reasoning really is the epistemological bottom line on which all ‘faith’ is grounded. In the words of Pope John Paul II: ‘By the authority of his absolute transcendence, God who makes himself known is also the source of the credibility of what he reveals.’ It goes without saying that this begs the question of whether the texts at issue really were authored or inspired by God, and on what grounds one knows this. ‘Faith’ is not in fact a rejection of reason, but simply a lazy acceptance of bad reasons. ‘Faith’ is the pseudo-justification that some people trot out when they want to make claims without the necessary evidence.But of course we never apply these lax standards of evidence to the claims made in the other fellow’s holy scriptures: when it comes to religions other than one’s own, religious people are as rational as everyone else. Only our own religion, whatever it may be, seems to merit some special dispensation from the general standards of evidence.And here, it seems to me, is the crux of the conflict between religion and science. Not the religious rejection of specific scientific theories (be it heliocentrism in the 17th century or evolutionary biology today); over time most religions do find some way to make peace with well-established science. Rather, the scientific worldview and the religious worldview come into conflict over a far more fundamental question: namely, what constitutes evidence.Science relies on publicly reproducible sense experience (that is, experiments and observations) combined with rational reflection on those empirical observations. Religious people acknowledge the validity of that method, but then claim to be in the possession of additional methods for obtaining reliable knowledge of factual matters — methods that go beyond the mere assessment of empirical evidence — such as intuition, revelation, or the reliance on sacred texts. But the trouble is this: What good reason do we have to believe that such methods work, in the sense of steering us systematically (even if not invariably) towards true beliefs rather than towards false ones? At least in the domains where we have been able to test these methods — astronomy, geology and history, for instance — they have not proven terribly reliable. Why should we expect them to work any better when we apply them to problems that are even more difficult, such as the fundamental nature of the universe?Last but not least, these non-empirical methods suffer from an insuperable logical problem: What should we do when different people’s intuitions or revelations conflict? How can we know which of the many purportedly sacred texts — whose assertions frequently contradict one another — are in fact sacred?”