82 quotes found
“The world outside is a strange, but relentless mirror.”
“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.”
“...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. ”
“Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?”
“...reality is always plural and mutable.”
“We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infan...”
“We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.”
“Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.”
“Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?”
“Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than a...”
“Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, a...”
“Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want alwa...”
“Time is the Mind of Space.”
“In provisionally characterizing the object which serves as the theme of our investigation (the Being of entities, or the meaning of Being in general), it seems that we have also delineated the meth...”
“I now turn to a *subjective* consideration that belongs here; yet I can give even less distinctness to it than to the objective consideration just discussed, for I shall be able to express it only ...”
“What is more, in fact, we very soon look upon the world as something whose non-existence is not only conceivable, but even preferable to its existence. Therefore our astonishment at it easily passe...”
“In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence."from...”
“We also find *physics*, in the widest sense of the word, concerned with the explanation of phenomena in the world; but it lies already in the nature of the explanations themselves that they cannot ...”
“One of my principal theses is that in every case the nature of a being (contingent as well as essential nature) can, in principle, be immanent to and truly inherent in knowledge and reflexive consc...”
“To know what questions may reasonably be asked is already a great and necessary proof of sagacity and insight. For if a question is absurd in itself and calls for unnecessary answers, it not only b...”
