War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.
Tis the wink of an eye, ’tis the draught of a breath,From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud-Oh! why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.
To the extent that in one’s act of faith one participates in the truth through reason and heart, faith already implies a particular level of knowledge and of certainty.
Most of us form estimates of our intelligence, wisdom, and moral fiber that are considerably higher than an objective estimate would warrant; no doubt 90 percent of us think ourselves well above average along these lines.
Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies — the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.
The unity of scientific and spiritual knowledge is realized when each of the particular sciences is organically related to the supreme knowledge of al-tawhid.
We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.
Faith in Qur’anic revelation unveils all the possibilities that lie before the human intellect.
For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.
Since God is truth, a contempt for truth is equally a contempt for God.
You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,” he said, his glasses flashing from the early night’s light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause.“You know what I mean, Tom?” he asked. “It’s just not.
I tried to make my life colorful with basic colors Red, Green and Blue……. ohh god… my perfection in blending made it white !!! now again confused…. should go with 🙁 or 🙂
We all reach a point that is the limit of our understanding. When we stare over the precipice of uncertainty and into the dark unknown that we cannot explain with hard evidence, that is when we trade understanding for belief. At best, we make an educated guess. At worst, we make blind leaps of faith.
Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?” asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them. “Why is it an either or question?” the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought.
We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one’s own deception is to accuse others of deceit.
In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;—in that of poets of amusement—in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition,—and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.
Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.
How can I know for sure if it’s my son speaking and not you?You never can, my lord. Just as no man can ever be sure that he alone is a thinking and feeling creature and everyone else a machine that only pretends to feel and think.
But no: he was empty, he was confronted by a vast anger, a desperate anger, he saw it and could almost have touched it. But it was inert – if it were to live and find expression and suffer, he must lend it his own body. It was other people’s anger. Swine! He clenched his fists, he strode along, but nothing came, the anger remained external to himself.
The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began.
Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.
It’s a sad day for American Capitalism when a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over central park.
When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because moon atoms penetrate my eye.
Mr. Trask, do you think the thoughts of people suddenly become important at a given age? Do you have sharper feelings or clearer thoughts now than when you were ten? Do you see as well, hear as well, taste as vitally?
There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little sheets of paper speak to us, arouse us, teach us, open our hearts and in turn open their hearts to us like brothers. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.
Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is.
I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency’s sake.
He could very likely have appealed for leniency. At least he could have saved his life by agreeing to leave Athens. But had he done this he would not have been Socrates. He valued his conscience–and the truth– higher than life.
Socrates: This man, on one hand, believes that he knows something, while not knowing [anything]. On the other hand, I – equally ignorant – do not believe [that I know anything].
If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called ‘faith’, but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!
If you use a philosophy education well, you can get your foot in the door of any industry you please. Industries are like the blossoms on a tree while philosophy is the trunk – it holds the tree together, but it often goes unnoticed.
A doctrine of expression rather than one of suppression makes a stronger appeal to man.
It’s better to have a million small religions with each one containing a great truth. Than one great religion containing a million small truths.
It is a well known fact that even among highly cultured peoples the belief in animism prevails generally. Even the scholar may kick the chair against which he accidentally stumbles, and derive great satisfaction from thus ‘getting even’ with the perverse chair.
Among peoples who possess a highly developed pugnacious instinct we find the greatest progress in the arts, sciences, social and political organization, commerce and industry. The instinct takes the milder form of rivalry which is the motive force of the great portion of the serious labors of mankind.
Good man and bad man with money goes a long ways. ~ Amunhotep El Bey
Believe me if you consult philosophy she will persuade you not to lit so long at your counting desk
Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.
How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo’s lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets, Where no crude surfet raigns.
You and I are part of the colony of heaven. Right now, we may reside here on earth, but our passport indicates that our citizenship is in heaven. We are on the earth, but not of the earth.
How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition … The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction for this obscene call, ENJOY, is superego. The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy. The problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy.
Furthermore, as the body suffers the horrors of disease and the pangs of pain, so we see the mind stabbed with anguish, grief and fear. What more natural than that it should likewise have a share in death?
When you’re in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That’s the consolation of philosophy.
The Purpose of Philosophy is to fall in Love. To strip the world of all its clothes, and fall in Love with it as it stand before you completely naked.
A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.
I have learned to be a friend to myself Great improvement this indeed Such a one can never be said to be alone for know that he who is a friend to himself is a friend to all mankind
The Great Way is not named; Great Discriminations are not spoken; Great Benevolence is not benevolent; Great Modesty is not humble; Great Daring does not attack. If the Way is made clear, it is not the Way.
J’ai lu les postmodernistes avec un certain intérêt avec même admiration. Mais quand je les lis, j’ai toujours cet horrible sentiment lancinant que quelque chose d’absolument essentiel est oublié. Plus on dit qu’une personne est un produit social, ou un confluent de forces ou fragmentée, ou marginalisée et plus on ouvre tout un nouveau monde d’excuses.
Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.
Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy. Great words are clear and limpid; little words are shrill and quarrelsome.
The cynic sees only cynicism, the depressive can taint creation with one glance
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he next comes to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.
Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it—which always amounts to the same.
It seems to me that good philosophy will always have a place in the investigation of any matter of deep human importance, because of its commitment to clarity, to carefully drawn distinctions, to calm argument rather than prejudice and dogmatic assertionPhilosophical Interventions (Reviews 1986-2011)
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
If you write in the Old World, and against it, your work must die, go missing, be veiled, before it can live the life for which it was destined in the New World.
And you don’t even need to say anything. I’m screwed up. I don’t know how any of this works anymore than you do. But I do believe you’re worth every second it would take to figure it out,” Mason said, a smile taking over his features.
If that which we have found is the corruption of solitude, then what can men wish for save corruption? If this is the great evil of being alone, than what is good and what is evil?
I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?