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On scientific grounds this big bang assumption is much less the palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms. . . . On philosophical grounds too I cannot see any good reason for preferring the big bang idea. Indeed it seems to me in the philosophical sense to be a distinctly unsatisfactory notion, since it puts the basic assumption out of sight where it can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.
Fred HoyleEvery philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.
Bertrand RussellIf there is such a thing as philosophical progress, then why - unlike scientific progress - is it so invisible? Philosophical progress is invisible because it is incorporated into our points of view. What was torturously secured by complex argument comes widely shared intuition, so obvious that we forget its provenance.
Rebecca GoldsteinSomebody insults you and you feel anger. Don't miss this opportunity; try to understand why, why this anger. And don't make it a philosophical thing. Don't go to the library to consult about anger. Anger is happening to you -- it is an experience, a live experience. Focus your whole attention on it and try to understand why it is happening to you. It is not a philosophical problem. No Freud is to be consulted about it. There is no need! It is just foolish to consult somebody else while anger is happening to you. You can touch it. You can taste it. You will be burned by it.
RajneeshI suggest in my own discussion of this episode, Mann invites us to set the attempt to philosophize about his predicament in the context of Aschenbach's life. The literary presentation thus adds to the naked philosophical skeleton.
Philip KitcherOh, a very useful philosophical animal, your average tortoise. Outrunning metaphorical arrows, beating hares in races... very handy.
Terry PratchettPhilosophical argument has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that was in me but my heart has always assured me that the Gospel of Jesus Christ must be reality.
Daniel WebsterI still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
Anton ChekhovWe often confuse spiritual knowledge with spiritual attainment. Spirituality is not a matter of knowing scriptures and engaging in philosophical discussions. It is a matter of heart culture, of unmeasurable strength.
Mahatma GandhiIf you are religious, you believe that your religion is the 'right' oneโand, in many cases, all others will be sent to hell. Similarly, a nationalist believes his or her nation is better or more advancedโand a racist believes that an inherent difference between each race make his or her ethnicity superior. All of these ideologies spawn the hate, philosophical disagreements, and prejudices that have been the catalysts for various atrocious acts throughout history.
David G. McAfeeI was unwilling to - without getting too philosophical about it - I was unwilling to structure my spirituality in the way that the church wanted me to structure it.
Peter JurasikSome people try to get very philosophical and cerebral about what they're trying to say with jazz. You don't need any prologues, you just play. If you have something to say of any worth then people will listen to you.
Oscar PetersonThe philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
Jacques BarzunPhotography is a response that has to do with the momentary recognition of things. Suddenly you're alive. A minute later there was nothing there. I just watched it evaporate. You look one moment and there's everything, next moment it's gone. Photography is very philosophical.
Joel MeyerowitzMetaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.
Joseph Alexander LeightonI asked this heroic pet lover how it felt to have died for a schnauzer named Teddy. Salvador Biagiani was philosophical. He said it sure beat dying for absolutely nothing in the Viet Nam War.
Kurt VonnegutI want to find a way of speaking to fellow human beings that will be cool rather than heated, philosophical rather than polemical, that will bring enlightenment rather than seeking to divide us into the righteous and the sinners, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats.
J. M. CoetzeeI would say it was the directors. We have to give credit to the directors for this, because in the script, we just said, "Gru's Minions do this or do that" in the initial draft. And then, they came up with the characters' design and the philosophical concept of the Minions. And then, we started writing to that. We have to give a lot of credit to them.
Cinco PaulYou have to put aside your ideology. Howsoever beautiful it looks, howsoever systematic it looks, howsoever philosophical you have made and decorated it, you have to put it aside and see within. That's the whole method of meditation, awareness, watchfulness.
RajneeshMany environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale JamiesonThe blues are important primarily because they contain the cultural expression and the cultural response to blacks in America and to the situation that they find themselves in. And contained in the blues is a philosophical system at work. And as part of the oral tradition, this is a way of passing along information.
August WilsonAs a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.
Joseph BrodskyThat's an interesting philosophical question. When your boner goes away, is that one gone... forever?
Adam CarollaYou will all know that in the Middle Ages there were supposed to be various classes of angels. these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world.
Charles WilliamsAs long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change - that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.
Richard RortyIn Ephesians 5, Paul shows us that even on earth Jesus did not use his power to oppress us but sacrificed everything to bring us into union with him. And this takes us beyond the philosophical to the personal and the practical. If God had the gospel of Jesus's salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only 'works' to the degree that approximates the pattern of God's self-giving love in Christ.
Timothy KellerIt is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.
Alfred North Whitehead...life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.
Julian BarnesThe chief philosophical value of physics is that it gives the mind something distinct to lay hold of, which, if you don't, Nature at once tells you you are wrong.
James Clerk MaxwellThe process of making films is so technically demanding that it's a distraction. You don't spend your time thinking about the philosophical content, which is often very depressing.
Woody AllenSecular humanism does not have the essential attributes of a religion: belief in a deity, the wish for some sort of afterlife, sacred dogma or texts, or an absolutist moral creed. Instead, it expresses a philosophical and ethical point of view, and it draws upon the scientific method in formulationg its naturalistic view of the nature.
Paul KurtzI don't really get philosophical, but I believe that nice people are strong and usually in my horror stories, I don't like to write about the old standard where some rotten guy gets chased by a mean spirit that gets him in the end.I'd rather write about nice people that are menaced from outside by some sort of evil power and who sort of slug it out.
Stephen KingThere is in Albert Camusโ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.
AberjhaniFirst would be the literary side, then the spiritual and philosophical. The political side is required principally because of the necessity of the current Russian position.
Aleksandr SolzhenitsynWhat Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways, and especially in taking the colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration. If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Isaac NewtonCautiousness in judgment is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
Georg C. LichtenbergWe might even invent laws for series or formula in an arbitrary manner, and set the engine to work upon them, and thus deduce numerical results which we might not otherwise have thought of obtaining; but this would hardly perhaps in any instance be productive of any great practical utility, or calculated to rank higher than as a philosophical amusement.
Ada LovelacePoetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
AristotleSome people say What's the use of the term if it has to be so fully documented and constrained and footnoted and all the rest. My response to that is: there is no theological word that does not have to be similarly footnoted and constrained: justification, spirit, sanctification etc. Any term can be distorted or domesticated or fly off the handle because of another alien philosophical structure that's imposed on the text and so on. Inerrancy is no different from what we find in every other theologically loaded word.
D. A. CarsonSign language is the equal of speech, lending itself equally to the rigorous and the poetic, to philosophical analysis or to making love.
Oliver SacksThose who are anti-God and anti-Christian in America have infiltrated the highest levels of the educational establishment. They have a philosophical commitment to eliminating any vestige of biblical Christianity from American thought and life. They are well-positioned, well-funded and well-connected. They are a very small minority in America, yet their level of commitment is rarely matched among Christians.
Rick ScarboroughAfter all these years of wandering around as a street photographer and a journalist, I decided that this world is such a curious, screwed up place so full of contradictions... that I couldn't look at it any more in the raw form without trying to find some way of balancing it in a more philosophical context - less in a reportorial manner and more in an artistic one.
Burk UzzleRadio was, in a way, a very philosophical medium. You could make an argument on the radio, and people listened to it. Television is already harder because people's attention span becomes shorter with television. Cut to a commercial and all that.
Martha C. NussbaumAlthough you can find certain differences among the Buddhist philosophical schools about how the universe came into being, the basic common question addressed is how the two fundamental principles-external matter and internal mind or consciousness-although distinct, affect one another. External causes and conditions are responsible for certain of our experiences of happiness and suffering. Yet we find that it is principally our own feelings, our thoughts and our emotions, that really determine whether we are going to suffer or be happy.
Dalai LamaThe definition of deism is the philosophical idea of God as a first cause of the universe, who lays down the laws of nature and lets them run like clockwork, indifferent to the fate of the people subject to them.
Elizabeth S. AndersonThe existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature
John BergerJ. Budziszewski is perhaps the clearest and most eloquent natural lawyer writing today. When reading his works I often find myself amazed by his insights and wondering, 'Why didnโt I think of that?' And then it dawns on me, 'That's what C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton do to me as well.' The Line Through the Heart is another destination in J. Budziszewski's philosophical quest to lead his readers to the promised land of the good, the true, and the beautiful, to guide us to that place where we have always been but can't seem to find.
Francis J. Beckwith