Metaphysical Quotes - Page 4

• By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am.

  Haruki Murakami

  Running, Firsts, Action

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• What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

  Federico Fellini

  Country, Artist, Reality

  "Every Time We Say Goodbye". Sight & Sound (London), June 1991.

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• Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.

  C. S. Lewis

  Philosophy, Mean, Doe

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Writing, Tired, Cat

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• I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’. In fact, ‘flesh and blood’ describes them very well: they resemble cuts of meat laid out on the butcher’s marble slab, dead creatures bleeding as though still alive.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Real, Book, Character

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.47, Profile Books

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• Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile.

  Ben Aaronovitch

  Phones, Library, Bats

  Ben Aaronovitch (2012). “Whispers Under Ground”, p.173, Del Rey

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• Nothing in our politics is any longer driven or designed by individual humans who have a name and a face; we have sunk from theism into impersonal and depersonalizing deism, a scheme of rule by alien and implacable abstract metaphysical forces.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Names, Faces

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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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• Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Humanity, Tasks, Social Behavior

  R. Buckminster Fuller “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• Christianity is an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with fables, contradictions and absurdities: it was spawned in the fevered imagination of the Orientals, and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, where some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and where some imbeciles actually believed it.

  Frederick The Great

  Europe, Imagination, Fiction

  Attributed to Frederick II of Prussia in "Civilization: The West and the Rest", Book by Niall Ferguson, 2011.

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• If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

  A.J. Ayer

  Religion, Atheism, True Or False

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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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• Football is not a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.

  Arnold J. Mandell

  Football, Islands, Games

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• Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Life, Photography, Art

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “The Birth of Tragedy”, p.4, Courier Corporation

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• Constitutions are not designed for metaphysical or logical subtleties, for niceties of expression, for critical propriety, for elaborate shades of meaning, or for the exercise of philosophical acuteness or judicial research. They are instruments of a practical nature, founded on the common business of human life, adapted to common wants, designed for common use, and fitted for common understandings.

  Joseph Story

  Philosophical, Exercise, Expression

  Joseph Story (1851). “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: With a Preliminary Review of the Constitutional History of the Colonies and States, Before the Adoption of the Constitution”, p.322

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• Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.

  Albert Camus

  Order, History, Creative

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• The pictures achieve something rarely articulated about the metaphysical state of swimming: The body, immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same time. Weightless yet stronger.

  Leanne Shapton

  Swimming, Stronger, Body

  Leanne Shapton (2012). “Swimming Studies”, p.188, Penguin

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• The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.

  Edward Abbey

  Gnarly, World, Knobs

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.9, RosettaBooks

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• I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

  Edmund Burke

  Simple, Reality, Views

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• The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflicy between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society.

  Max Horkheimer

  Fate, World, Favors

  Max Horkheimer (1972). “Critical Theory: Selected Essays”, p.138, A&C Black

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• If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity.

  Hannah Arendt

  Loss, Men, Space

  Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.55, University of Chicago Press

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• Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.

  Bell Hooks

  Believe, Philosophical, Erotic

  Bell Hooks (2014). “Teaching To Transgress”, p.199, Routledge

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• Small objects, like the Walkman first and then the iPod, create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space.

  Paola Antonelli

  Technology, Small Objects, Ipods

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• The Cabala may be defined to be a system of philosophy which embraces certain mystical interpretations of Scripture, and metaphysical and spiritual beings... Much use is made of it in the advanced degrees, and entire Rites have been constructed on its principles.

  Albert Mackey

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Principles

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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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