All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”

“Learned we may be with another man’s learning: we can only be wise with wisdom of our own.”

“A preoccupation with the next world clearly shows an inability to cope credibly with this one.”

“A painting is more than the sum of its parts,’ he would tell me, and then go on to explain how the cow by itself is just a cow, and the meadow by itself is just grass and flowers, and the sun peeking through the trees is just a beam of light, but put them all together and you’ve got magic.”

“The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”

“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.”

“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy”

“He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing .”

“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

“The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.”

“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.”

“I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of the peace.”

“I am my world.”

“You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.”