Metaphysical Quotes - Page 8

• love is so very subtle an essence, such an indefinable metaphysical marvel, that its due force, though very cruelly felt by the sufferer himself, is never clearly understood by those who look on at its torments and wonder why he takes the common fever so badly.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  Love Is, Essence, Fever

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (2015). “Lady Audley's Secret”, p.344, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Past, Thinking, Law

  R. Buckminster Fuller (1982). “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, p.278, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

  Henry Miller

  Writing, Adventure, Discovery

  Henry Miller (1964). “Henry Miller on Writing”, New Directions Publishing

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• Monotheistic religions in the West have tended to conflate having a general orientation in life, having a specific theory of the world, having a sense of the positive meaningfulness of one's existence, and having a fixed set of rules for behavior, but these elements are in principle separable. ... The "metaphysical need," ... both Marx and Nietzsche held, is a historical phenomenon that arises under determinate circumstances, and could be expected to disappear under other circumstances that we could relatively easily envisage.

  Raymond Geuss

  Historical, Principles, Needs

  "Philosophy and Real Politics". Book by Raymond Geuss, 2008.

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• There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. It is a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Fall, Physicians, Dull

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.801, Modern Library

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• Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

  Taner Edis

  Religion, Boundaries, Creator

  Taner Edis (2002). “The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science”, Pyr Books

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• The more serious poetry of the race has a philosophical structure of thought. It contains beliefs and conceptions in regard to the nature of man and the universe, God and the soul, fate and providence, suffering, evil and destiny. Great poetry always has, like the higher religion, a metaphysical content. It deals with the same august issues, experiences and conceptions as metaphysics or first philosophy.

  Joseph Alexander Leighton

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Fate

  Joseph Alexander Leighton (1919). “The field of philosophy: an outline of lectures on introduction to philosophy”

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• My comic sense, although deliberately Americanized, is, in its intent, much closer related to the crazy wisdom of Zen monks and the goofy genius of Taoist masters than it is to, say, the satirical gibes on Saturday Night Live. It has both a literary and a metaphysical function.

  Tom Robbins

  Crazy, Night, Genius

  "The Green Man : Tom Robbins". Interview with Gregory Daurer, in High Times, June 12, 2002.

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• The talk about balance, nuclear balance, seems to me to be metaphysical and doesn't seem to be real at all.

  E. P. Thompson

  Real, Balance, Nuclear

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• The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Insanity, Understanding, Lapses

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• The question that faces every man born into this world is not what should be his purpose, which he should set about to achieve, but just what to do with life? The answer, that he should order his life so that he can find the greatest happiness in it, is more a practical question, similar to that of how a man should spend his weekend, then a metaphysical proposition as to what is the mystic purpose of his life in the scheme of the universe.

  Lin Yutang

  Men, Weekend, Order

  Lin Yutang (2013). “Lin Yutang - The Importance Of Living”, p.71, Read Books Ltd

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• Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue

  Immanuel Kant

  Adoption, Humanity, Principles

  "Metaphysics of Morals". Book by Immanuel Kant, Part Two : Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, 1797.

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• I am sorry the infernal Divinities, who visit mankind with diseases, and are therefore at perpetual war with Doctors, should have prevented my seeing all you great Men at Soho to-day-Lord! what inventions, what wit, what rhetoric, metaphysical, mechanical and pyrotecnical, will be on the wing, bandy'd like a shuttlecock from one to another of your troop of philosophers! while poor I, I by myself I, imprizon'd in a post chaise, am joggled, and jostled, and bump'd, and bruised along the King's high road, to make war upon a pox or a fever!

  Erasmus Darwin

  Kings, Sorry, War

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• The American Indians, the ancient Indians would say, the metaphysical ones would say: "Power binds us together." Power, for a while, makes us what we are, perceivers, luminous perceivers of reality.

  Frederick Lenz

  Power, Reality, Together

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• Is the world ruled by strict laws or not? This question I regard as metaphysical. The laws we find are always hypotheses; which means that they may always be superseded, and that they may possibly be deduced from probability estimates. Yet denying causality would be the same as attempting to persuade the theorist to give up his search; and that such an attempt cannot be backed by anything like a proof.

  Karl Popper

  Giving Up, Mean, Science

  Karl Popper (2005). “The Logic of Scientific Discovery”, p.244, Routledge

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• What is enthralling and illuminating about The Metaphysical Club is its portraits of individuals and their milieus. Menand is wonderfully deft at evoking a climate of ideas or a cultural sensibility, embodying it in a character, and moving his characters into and out of one another's lives. What might have been a jumble of intellectual movements and colorful minor figures (...) is instead a subtle weave of entertaining narrative and astute interpretation.

  George Scialabba

  Moving, Character, Ideas

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• Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil.

  Albert Camus

  Life And Death, Evil, Unity

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.24, Vintage

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• In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.

  Albert Camus

  Unity, Demand, Rebellion

  Albert Camus (2012). “The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt”, p.255, Vintage

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• To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere, it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings. A reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once.

  Antoni Tapies

  Reality, Achieve, Thorough

  "Antoni Tapies". UNESCO Courier, June 1994.

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• Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

  Bertrand Russell

  Gun, Ironclads, Arbiter

  Bertrand Russell (1994). “Philosophical Essays”, p.109, Psychology Press

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• Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Religious, Intellectual, Quality

  "Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1991.

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• In the metaphysical elements of aesthetics the various nonmoral feelings are to be made use of; in the elements of moral metaphysics the various moral feelings of men, according to the differences in sex, age, education, and government, of races and climates, are to be employed.

  Immanuel Kant

  Sex, Men, Differences

  Immanuel Kant (1904). “The Educational Theory of Immanuel Kant”

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• America was based on a big promise--a great big one: the Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house, that's quite a problem--particularly when you've got to make money and get ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children, and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776, and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of America--you see, that saddle's going to jump now and then and it pricks.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Children, America, Self

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• For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word.

  Jacques Maritain

  Love Is, Giving, Absolutes

  Jacques Maritain (2013). “The Peasant of the Garonne: An Old Layman Questions Himself about the Present Time”, p.9, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• [My first children's book] is very subliminal, let's put it that way. It even has a bit of a metaphysical little message in there [about how] we're all somehow connected and we all have a responsibility toward each other. Although you may feel alone in the world, you definitely are not.

  Gloria Estefan

  Children, Book, Responsibility

  "5 Minutes With... Gloria Estefan". Interview with Robert Dominguez, www.nydailynews.com. October 31, 2005.

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