Metaphysical Quotes - Page 13

• What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!

  Brion Gysin

  Nuts, Doe, Cracks

  Brion Gysin (2005). “The Process”, p.174, The Overlook Press

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• Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

  Ntozake Shange

  Women, Feminist, African American

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• My point is, however, that churches do promote beliefs that would more appropriately find a place in a context of intellectual debate. They wind up cheerleading for highly dubious opinions on historical, scientific, and metaphysical matters, simply on the bases of emotional preference and the inertia of tradition. They demand conformity to these beliefs, and if you cannot swim with the current, then, well partner, maybe you'd be happier in another pool, another lake in fact, the one ablaze with burning sulfur.

  Robert M. Price

  Cheerleading, Emotional, Wind

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• We cannot ultimately specify the grounds (either metaphysical or logical or empirical) upon which we hold that our knowledge is true. Being committed to such grounds, dwelling in them, we are projecting ourselves to what we believe to be true from or through these grounds. We cannot therefore see what they are. We cannot look at them because we are looking with them.

  Michael Polanyi

  Believe, Dwelling, Looks

  Michael Polanyi, Harry Prosch (2008). “Meaning”, p.61, University of Chicago Press

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• Life is an energy field, a bunch of molecules. And these particular molecules formed to make these four guys, who then formed into this band called the Beatles and did all that work. I have to think that was something metaphysical. Something alchemic. Something that must be thought of as magic.

  Paul McCartney

  Thinking, Guy, Magic

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• The soul contains few secrets and longings which cannot be sensibly discussed, analyzed, and polled. Solitude, the very condition which sustained the individual against and beyond his society, has become technically impossible. Logical and linguistic analysis demonstrate that the old metaphysical problems are illusory problems; the quest for the "meaning" of things can be reformulated as the quest for the meaning of words, and the established universe of discourse and behavior can provide perfectly adequate criteria for the answer.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Soul, Solitude, Secret

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.71, Beacon Press

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• Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe that the beauty we steal from any man-made thing is stolen from its more virtuous and metaphysical backstory, wherein "real" beauty is said to reside.

  Dave Hickey

  Real, Believe, Men

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• In writing Snowboarding to Nirvana I have intentionally written an inspirational spiritual adventure story, which will hopefully provide people with metaphysical techniques, spiritual knowledge, hope and a brighter view of life.

  Frederick Lenz

  Spiritual, Writing, Adventure

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• I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously.

  Frederick Lenz

  Writing, Thinking, Important

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• By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists.

  Josiah Royce

  Mean, Unique, Class

  Josiah Royce (1952). “The Religious Philosophy of Josiah Royce; Edited, with an Introductory Essay, by Stuart Gerry Brown”

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• Oratory, like the drama, abhors lengthiness; like the drama, it must keep doing. It avoids, as frigid, prolonged metaphysical soliloquy. Beauties themselves, if they delay or distract the effect which should be produced on the audience, become blemishes.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Drama, Oratory, Delay

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• You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Christian, Problem, Materialism

  "Paul's Letter to American Christians". Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, November 4, 1956.

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• What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices.

  Richard A. Falk

  Capitalist Economy, Practice, Understanding

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• One of the points where the art world is at its most metaphysical is in this weird aspect of the power of the expert. There are experts who claim they cannot be fooled because they have an inner connection to an artist and can feel whether something is genuine or fake. I've heard experts say, on panels: When it comes to my period, or my painters, I cannot be fooled. And of course that's completely ridiculous.

  Daniel Kehlmann

  Art, Fake, Connections

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• It's also one of these strange points where metaphysics converges with economy. Because really what the experts are doing is creating value by banishing doubt. All great dead painters basically have this one person, this expert who has the metaphysical power to grant a seal of authenticity.

  Daniel Kehlmann

  Creating Value, Doubt, Experts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism.

  David Papineau

  Mean, Identity, Use

  "Physical". Interview with Richard Marshall, www.3ammagazine.com. April 8, 2013.

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• I argue, based on metaphysical and physical considerations, that we should think of the fundamental parts of the world as a mix of intrinsic natures, rather like a paint-pot filled with a rainbow of colors, loosely mixed to give a richly varied, spatiotemporally inseparable, spread of qualities, and that this mixture is what gives rise to ordinary reality.

  L.A. Paul

  Reality, Thinking, Color

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• However, within the limits of the human, it is important to recognise our common humanity. I think that a perspective based on common human needs has the most chance of being accepted and this does not depend on any particular metaphysical outlook.

  Alison Assiter

  Thinking, Common Humanity, Perspective

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.

  Tim Crane

  Views, Naturalist, Naturalism

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Wine, Paris, Glasses

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• Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be.

  Steven Holl

  Space, Links, Architecture

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• Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is.

  Martha Beck

  Angel, Shifting, Given

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• From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

  Aldous Huxley

  Passion, Men, History

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2002). “Complete Essays: 1956-1963, and supplement, 1920-1948”, Ivan R. Dee Publisher

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• Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing.

  Isaac Newton

  Ideas, Diversity, Atheism

  Sir Isaac Newton (2012). “Newton's Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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• That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.

  Susan Jacoby

  Brain, Belief, Natural

  Susan Jacoby (2005). “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism”, p.132, Macmillan

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