Metaphysics Quotes

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Consider metaphysics as an extension of the physical.

Many people would claim that the boundary conditions are not part of physics but belong to metaphysics or religion. They would claim that nature had complete freedom to start the universe off any way it wanted. That may be so, but it could also have made it evolve in a completely arbitrary and random manner. Yet all the evidence is that it evolves in a regular way according to certain laws. It would therefore seem reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the boundary conditions.

Stephen Hawking

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.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

G. K. Chesterton

Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman...

Friedrich Nietzsche

Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.

Upon the solution of this problem, or upon sufficient proof of the impossibility of synthetical knowledge a priori, depends the existence or downfall of metaphysics.

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But, like a hawk encumbered with his hood,
Explaining metaphysics to the nation—
I wish he would explain his explanation.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms, well then think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affects us more or less intensely.

Physics is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a metaphysics on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Some modern philosophers have gone so far as to say that words should never be confronted with facts but should live in a pure, autonomous world where they are compared only with other words. When you say, 'the cat is a carnivorous animal,' you do not mean that actual cats eat actual meat, but only that in zoology books the cat is classified among carnivora. These authors tell us that the attempt to confront language with fact is 'metaphysics' and is on this ground to be condemned. This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.

Bertrand Russell

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

Bertrand Russell

Science always goes abreast with the just elevation of the man, keeping step with religion and metaphysics; or, the state of science is an index of our self-knowledge.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn't pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.

Simone de Beauvoir

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness or generosity. A universe — in other words a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.

Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon [will] would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

As we divided natural philosophy in general into the inquiry of causes, and productions of effects: so that part which concerneth the inquiry of causes we do subdivide according to the received and sound division of causes. The one part, which is physic, inquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; and the other, which is metaphysic, handleth the formal and final causes.

I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.

Michel de Montaigne

Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.

A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation — for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason — but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly...

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

We call metaphysics the Science of Life, because to know pure metaphysics is to renew the life and make death and accident impossible.

Emma Curtis Hopkins

Metaphysics is the clearing house for all fundamental philosophical problems.

Joseph Alexander Leighton

One has to recognize that science is not metaphysics, and certainly not mysticism; it can never bring us the illumination and the satisfaction experienced by one enraptured in ecstasy. Science is sobriety and clarity of conception, not intoxicated vision.

Ludwig von Mises

What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent-fabulously more coherent-when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world....... but showing that, of course, was a very big job....

Robert M. Pirsig