Quotes About Metaphysics

Poetry is essentially the antithesis of Metaphysics: Metaphysics purge the mind of the senses and cultivate the disembodiment of the spiritual; Poetry is all passionate and feeling and animates the inanimate; Metaphysics are most perfect when concerned with universals; Poetry, when most concerned with particulars.

I'm not sure if Cupitt himself still uses this term, but it's useful in suggesting that, actually, there are more choices than the choice between nihilism and faith. In fact, the issue may not be faith as such but the fact that for millennia, Christianity has buttressed itself with a particular kind of metaphysics that has now seemingly reached the end of its life-span. But perhaps Buddhist metaphysics could provide an alternative here - or, at least, offer a direction of travel.

Metaphysics is a science.

To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.

The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

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.

You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

The bible is a source of great inspiration to me. It is a textbook of metaphysics. Within the bible are keys to personal growth, and lessons in personal actualization. The bible is a spiritual masterpiece.

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this - what is the world? And what are we? From the beginning of humanity some have been under a compulsion to ask these questions, and have felt a craving for the answers. This is what is really meant by any such phrase as 'mankind's need for metaphysics.'

Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology.

When I began to think deeply about the metaphysics of love I talked with everyone around me about it. I talked to large audiences and even had wee one-on-one conversations with children about the way they think about love. I talked about love in every state, everywhere I traveled.

No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes.

Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived.

When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.

Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day.

The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.