Famous Quotes

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.

~ Daniel Amory

It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.To know the world will never be so bad.

~ R. Scott Bakker

The ruinous abdication by philosophy of its rightful domain is the consequence of the oblivion of philosophers to a great insight first beheld clearly by Socrates and re-affirmed by Kant as by no other philosopher. Science, concerned solely and exclusively with objective existents, cannot give answers to questions about meanings and values. Only ideas engendered by the mind and to be found nowhere but in the mind (Socrates), only the pure transcendental forms supplied by reason (Kant), can secure the ideals and values and put us in touch with the realities that constitute our moral and spiritual life. Twenty-four centuries after Socrates, two centuries after Kant, we badly need to re-learn the lesson.

~ D.r. Khashaba

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.

~ Ramsey Isler

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?

~ Iain Banks

Don’t you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world?” asked Connor irrelevantly.

~ Daniel Amory

In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legata de el si se avanta in lume, spre a muri undeva fara acoperis si fara lacrimi; adolescentii se gandesc la sinucideri in zile infinite de primavara, iar servitoarele fara amanti se lamenteaza duminicile, de parca inima lor e un cimitir in care mortii nu pot dormi.

~ Emil M. Cioran

Seduced by the spectacular theoretical and practical successes of the objective sciences into thinking that the methods and criteria of those sciences were the only means to truth, philosophers sought to apply those same methods and criteria to questions relating to the meaning of life and the values that give meaning to life. Philosophy, especially the Analytical species prevalent in the English-speaking world, was broken up into specialized disciplines and fragmented into particular problems, all swayed and impregnated by scientism, reductionism, and relativism. All questions of meaning and value were consigned to the rubbish heap of 'metaphysical nonsense'.

~ D.r. Khashaba

Really, nobody was there?” I asked.“Well, nobody important,” he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking.

~ Daniel Amory

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 :)

~ Saket Assertive

Call it a wonder or a mystery and you have an excuse to never try understanding it - an excuse to not take responsibility for it. People knew about love no more than they knew about Science, but at least most did not jump into Science headstrong, with the hope that they would figure it out as they went, or that some mysterious inborn trait would take care of it.

~ Lynna Merrill

Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time.

~ David E. Wilkins

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?” asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air. My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, “Disgusting cardboard it is!

~ Daniel Amory

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.

~ Daniel Amory

Ik kwam er achter dat ik er mijn hele leven heus niet naar had verlang om te leven - als wat anderen doen tenminste leven genoemd kan worden - maar wel om mezelf te kunnen uitdrukken.

~ Henry Miller

Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

~ Daniel C. Dennett

The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began.

~ Geerhardus Vos

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.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow.“You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.”Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters.“It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi …“Split him in two, and he would murder himself.”Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain …Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground.“But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen.So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.”He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black.“And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.”He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.

~ R. Scott Bakker

Since God is truth, a contempt for truth is equally a contempt for God.

~ Gordon H. Clark

Progress has always been achieved by probing well-entrenched and well-founded forms of life with unpopular and unfounded values. This is how man gradually freed himself from fear and from the tyranny of unexamined systems.

~ Paul Karl Feyerabend

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.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

you shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings ofHecato; it is these words: What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself. That wasindeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind.

~ Seneca

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.

~ Osman Bakar

Good god it's great to be a Bull Mongoni!

~ James J. Caterino

We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time as a function of our own action.

~ J.d. Bernal

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

~ Siri Hustvedt

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.

~ Alvin Plantinga

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.

~ Osman Bakar

Além disso, somos individualmente o produto de forças que não escolhemos e que mal compreendemos. Não escolhemos nossos pais nem a época em que nascemos, e assim recebemos uma determinada herança genética sobre a qual não temos controle algum, mas que, até um ponto significante, tem controle sobre nós. Essa herança determina, em parte, as doenças a que somos suscetíveis e os limites de nossas capacidades intelectuais, atléticas e morais. Talvez não totalmente, mas o suficiente. Nascemos num ambiente que vai preencher o pouco espaço que sobra do que foi determinado geneticamente, um ambiente que, novamente, não escolhemos e sobre o qual mal temos controle, pelo menos durante nossos anos de formação. A maneira como somos e aquilo que fazemos são resultados de nossos genes e nosso ambiente, que, juntos, exercem em nós uma influência que compreendemos de forma bastante nebulosa. Era isso que os filósofos existencialistas, com Jean-Paul Sartre, por exemplo, queriam dizer quando afirmavam que somos jogados no mundo.

~ Mark Rowlands

The man who says that all events are necessitated has no ground for critizing the man who says that not all events are necessitated. For according to him this is itself a necessitated event.

~ Epicurus

De jure objections are arguments of claims to the effect that Christian belief, whether or not true, is at any rate unjustifiable, or rationally unjustified, or irrational, or not intellectually respectable, or contrary to sound morality, or without sufficient evidence, or in some other way rationally unacceptable, not up to snuff from an intellectual point of view.

~ Alvin Plantinga

Tudo é permitido e válido em nome do monopólio universal da distinção entre o verdadeiro e o falso. Everything is permitted and valid in the name of universal monopoly of the distinction between true and false.

~ Victor Eustáquio

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.

~ Ian Hacking

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Rationalism is false not because it seeks to express reality in rational mode, so far as this possible, but because it seeks to embrace the whole of reality in the realm of reason, as if the reason coincides with the very principle of things.

~ Osman Bakar

Следует признать, что имеется определенный тип христианской этики, к которому осуждающая критика Ницше может быть применена справедливо. Паскаль и Достоевский, которых он сам приводит в качестве примера, – оба имеют что-то жалкое в своей добродетели. Паскаль принес в жертву своему Богу великолепный математический ум, тем самым приписывая Богу жестокость, которая является космическим расширением болезненных душевных мук самого Паскаля. Достоевский не желал иметь ничего общего с «личной гордостью»; он согрешил бы, чтобы покаяться и испытать наслаждение исповеди. Я не стану обсуждать вопрос, насколько в таких помрачениях ума следует обвинять христианство, но я согласен с Ницше, считая прострацию Достоевского презренной. Я должен согласиться и с тем, что прямота и гордость и даже некоторое самоутверждение являются элементами самого лучшего характера. Нельзя восхищаться добродетелью, в основе которой лежит страх.

~ Bertrand Russell

Particularity leads to peculiarity and then to pathological behavior. The three Ps. It is very insidious. You would eventually end up in a box. If you try to control your environment, it will control you. And everyone else around you will always have to be making adjustments to your maddening idiosyncracies...You are beginning to enslave yourself with your fussiness.

~ Susan Trott

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?

~ William Knox

Со своей стороны, я предпочитаю онтологическое доказательство [существования Бога], космологическое доказательство и остальной старый запас аргументов той сентиментальной нелогичности, которая берет начало от Руссо. Старые доказательства были по крайней мере честными; если они правильные, то они доказывали свою точку зрения, если они неправильные, то для любой критики доступно доказать это. Но новая теология сердца отказывается от доказательства; она не может быть отвергнута, потому что она не претендует на доказательство своей точки зрения. В конечном счете единственным основанием для ее принятия оказывается то, что она позволяет нам предаваться приятным грезам. Это не заслуживающая уважения причина, и, если бы я выбирал между Фомой Аквинским и Руссо, я выбрал бы Фому Аквинского.

~ Bertrand Russell