Agnosticism Quotes - Page 5

• Agnosticism is epistemologically self-contradictory on its own assumptions because its claim to make no assertion about ultimate reality rests upon a most comprehensive assertion about ultimate reality.

  Cornelius Van Til

  Reality, Self, Atheism

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• It is the best book ever written on the subject. There is nothing like it!

  Thomas A. Edison

  Book, Religion, Atheism

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• We are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. We can never have enough of nature.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Reality, Sublime, Atheism

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• I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals. Being at one with nature.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  God, Nature, Believe

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• The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

  Sigmund Freud

  Life, Men, Atheism

  Sigmund Freud (1930). “Civilization and Its Discontents”, p.1, Courier Dover Publications

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• As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

  Charles Darwin

  Life, Men, Judging

  The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin Religion (p. 277)

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• Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.

  Charles Darwin

  Believe, Men, Long

  Charles Darwin (2003). “On the Origin of Species”, p.433, Broadview Press

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• There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Truth, Educational, Atheism

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• With the strength of his spiritual sight and insight the distance, and as it were the space, around man continually expands: his world grows deeper, ever new stars, ever new images and enigmas come into view.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Spiritual, Stars, Distance

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1973). “Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future”, Penguin Classics

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• The transition from Religion to Scientific contemplation is a violent, dangerous leap, which is not to be recommended. In order to make this transition, art is far rather to be employed to relieve the mind overburdened with emotions. Out of the illogical comes much good. It is so firmly rooted in the passions, in language, in art, in religion, and generally in everything which gives value to life. It is only the naive people who can believe that the nature of man can be changed into a purely logical one. We have yet to learn that others can suffer, and this can never be completely learned.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Art, Believe, Passion

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• For such is man: a Theological Dogma might be refuted to him a thousand times - provided however, that he had need of it, he would again and again accept it as true. Belief is always most desired, most pressingly needed where there is a lack of will. Fanaticism is the sole "volitional strength" to which the weak and irresolute can be excited, as a sort of hypnotising of the entire sensory-intellectual system.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Intellectual, Atheism

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• ... superstitions, which, being unable to defend themselves on fair ground, raise these intangling brambles to cover and protect their weakness. Chased from the open country, these robbers fly into the forest, and lie in wait to break in upon every unguarded avenue of the mind, and overwhelm it with religious fears and prejudices. ... The idea of God, as meaning an infinitely intelligent, wise and good Being, arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and augmenting, without limit, those qualities of goodness and wisdom.

  David Hume

  Wise, Country, Religious

  David Hume (1779). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.10

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• And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.

  David Hume

  Determination, Believe, Giving

  An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding "Of Miracles" (1748)

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• ..when, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society, but advance principles, which they themselves, upon their own topics, if they argue consistently, must allow to be solid and satisfactory.

  David Hume

  Philosophical, Atheism, Foundation

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.358

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• The religious hypothesis, therefore, must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe: but no just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular.

  David Hume

  Religious, Atheism, Add

  David Hume (1758). “Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects”, p.360

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• Atheism, which people have tried to for hundreds of years as 'the ways of reason and science,' is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance.

  Harun Yahya

  Ignorance, Years, People

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• One reason education undoes belief is its teaching of evolution; Darwin's own drift from orthodoxy to agnosticism was symptomatic. Martin Lings is probably right in saying that more cases of loss of religious faith are to be traced to the theory of evolution ... than to anything else.

  Huston Smith

  Religious, Teaching, Loss

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• Writer Somerset Maugham, after his parents deaths, spent a few stultifying years in his uncle's vicarage. Later, in his teens at a boarding-school, having lost his belief in the existence of God said: "The whole horrible structure, based not on the love of God, but on the fear of hell, tumbled down like a house of cards."

  Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon

  Uncles, School, House Of Cards

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• Science is agnostic when it comes to god; not atheistic, as some people prefer to read that laden word wrongly; just agnostic.

  Eric Chaisson

  Inspirational, Life, God

  Eric Chaisson, Lola Judith Chaisson (2007). “Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos”, p.254, Columbia University Press

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• Why do we need faith when we have the technology to move mountains?

  Karl Jakob Weber

  Moving, Technology, Mountain

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• The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Vision, Agnostic, Complexity

  "Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution". Book by Kenneth E. Boulding, 1978.

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• Anyone who feels that they're in some way plugged into a meaningful, cosmic system is given a greater psychological balance as a result-whether or not they believe it contains a god-like figure at the control panels. Lots of people have this beneficial sense of being plugged into something bigger, even if they're not religious in the going-to-church-regularly sense.

  Robin Skynner

  Meaningful, Religious, Believe

  Robin Skynner, John Cleese (1984). “Families and how to survive them”, Vintage

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• When students of other sciences ask us what is now currently believed about the origin of species, we have no clear answer to give. Faith has given way to agnosticism. Meanwhile, though our faith in evolution stands unshaken we have no acceptable account of the origin of species.

  William Bateson

  Giving, Answers, Way

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• This deep agnosticism is more than the refusal of conventional agnosticism to take a stand on whether God exists or whether the mind survives bodily death. It is the willingness to embrace the fundamental bewilderment of a finite, fallible creature as the basis for leading a life that no longer clings to the superficial consolations of certainty.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Mind, Fundamentals, Embrace

  Stephen Batchelor (2010). “Confession of a Buddhist Atheist”, p.74, Spiegel & Grau

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• Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope.

  Stephen Batchelor

  Empathy, Demand, Shifting

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