Metaphysical Quotes - Page 4

• The old metaphysical prejudice that man 'always thinks' has not yet entirely disappeared. I am myself inclined to hold that man really thinks very little and very seldom.

  Wilhelm Wundt

  Men, Thinking, Psychology

  Wilhelm Wundt (2014). “Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology (Psychology Revivals)”, p.363, Routledge

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• A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

  Karl Marx

  Business, Sight, Analysis

  Karl Marx (1988). “Marx Selections”, MacMillan Publishing Company

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• Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products. This does not mean that evolution does not have metaphysical implications; I remain convinced that this is the case.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Mean, Doe, World

  Simon Conway Morris (2003). “Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe”, p.15, Cambridge University Press

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• In turbulent times, in times of great change, people head for the two extremes: fundamentalism and personal, spiritual experience...With no membership lists or even a coherent philosophy or dogma, it is difficult to define or measure the unorganized New Age movement. But in every major U.S. and European city, thousands who seek insight and personal growth cluster around a metaphysical bookstore, a spiritual teacher, or an education center.

  John Naisbitt

  Spiritual, Teacher, Philosophy

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• Without the cross the Discipline of Confession would be merely therapeutic. But it is so much more. It involves an objective [a better word would have been "metaphysical"] change in our relationship with God and a subjective change in us. It is a means of healing and transforming the inner spirit.

  Richard J. Foster

  Healing, Mean, Discipline

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• There are times when I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they're not around. There's also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself.

  David Ignatow

  Loneliness, Moving, Book

  David Ignatow, Ralph J. Mills (1980). “Open between us”, Univ of Michigan Pr

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• I stress the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and its metaphysical and mythic content.

  Arthur Boyd

  Stress, Landscape, Australian

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• The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn't seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer.

  Peter Wessel Zapffe

  Religious, Answers, Honest

  "To Be a Human Being". Documentary, (1989 - 90).

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• It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing.

  Simon Critchley

  Hands, Killers, Apes

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• Love is a metaphysical gravity.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Love Is, Gravity

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• One might get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction and uses a multiplicity of theories, metaphysical views, fairy tales, instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.

  Paul Feyerabend

  Science, Views, Use

  Paul Feyerabend (1993). “Against Method”, p.23, Verso

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• Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.

  Carl Jung

  Sound, Psychological, Assertion

  Carl Gustav Jung (1989). “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Psychology and religion”

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• Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

  Joan Robinson

  Quality, Circularity, Want

  Joan Robinson (1962). “Economic philosophy”, p.47, Transaction Publishers

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• A high place of honor, although doubtless one to be obtained only after enduring the pangs of a prolonged crucifixion, awaits that philosophical biologist, or that philosopher sufficiently acquainted with scientific biology, who subjects the modern doctrine of evolution to a thoroughly critical analysis, with a view to detect and to estimate its metaphysical assumptions.

  George Trumbull Ladd

  Philosophical, Views, Critical Analysis

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• For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Journey, Doctrine, Departure

  Joseph Brodsky, Cynthia L. Haven (2002). “Joseph Brodsky: Conversations”, p.99, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

  William James

  Cat, Night, Ideas

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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• [On the metaphysical:] ... I knew in some marvelous way I had touched the hem of the unknown. And being me, I wanted to lift that hemline a little bit more.

  Mae West

  Hem, Littles, Way

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• The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

  Annie Dillard

  Irrational

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• They had rejected the soul-body dichotomy, with its two corollaries: the impotence of man's mind and the damnation of this earth; they had rejected the doctrine of suffering as man's metaphysical fate, they proclaimed man's right to the pursuit of happiness and were determined to establish on earth the conditions required for man's proper existence, by the "unaided" power of their intellect.

  Ayn Rand

  Fate, Pursuit Of Happiness, Men

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• Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations.

  Paul Kurtz

  Atheism, Foundation, Needs

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• I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

  David Foster Wallace

  Basketball, Beautiful, Sports

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• Confucius was not so much a philsopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Zero, Order, Levels

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• Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.

  Aldous Huxley

  Atheism, Christianity, Accepted

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• Prayer's important, not just as some kind of a metaphysical exercise, but I think it's a way to refresh one's own mind and motive. If you're praying, you're really looking beyond your own personal thoughts and the pressures that are around you.

  Mike Huckabee

  Prayer, Exercise, Thinking

  "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" with Kim Lawton, www.pbs.org. September 16, 2007.

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• Emmet Fox was one of the world's greatest metaphysical teachers. His works have contributed profoundly to the spiritual understanding of millions of people, including myself.

  Marianne Williamson

  Spiritual, Teacher, People

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