Metaphysics Quotes

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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

Men of science, men given to "realism," are likely to make a clean sweep of old interests and sentiments as so much rubbish. They regard religion as superstition, metaphysics as moonshine, art as primitive pastime, and all ritual as monkey-business.

Herbert J. Muller

As long as you are occupied with the mathematical sciences and the technique of logic, you belong to those who walk around the palace in search of the gate.... When you complete your study of the natural sciences and get a grasp of the metaphysics, you enter into the inner courtyard and are in the same house as [God] he.

The states of consciousness are all that psychology needs to do her work with. Metaphysics or theology may prove the Soul to exist; but for psychology the hypothesis of such a substantial principle of unity is superfluous.

There is no field that will always remain the special province of metaphysics and into which scientific research can never carry any light; there are no "eternally unexplorable" areas.

Richard von Mises

One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.

James Russell Lowell

When the sense of mystery and enchantment no longer draws the mind to wander aimlessly and to love it knows not what; when, in short, twilight has no charm - then metaphysics will be worthless.

The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.

Metaphysics is a bower of safety in the garden of a fool's paradise. If men can run to such a bower whenever they encounter difficulties, there is lack of incentive to face genuine scientific labor bravely. A bower which gives protection is often chosen, instead of a steed which carries one to the winning front of battle.

Robert Tuttle Morris

There would be no history as we know it, no religion, no metaphysics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any social contract or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.

I walked on, musing with myself... whether, after all, A larger metaphysics might not help Our physics...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

Joseph Wood Krutch

The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in the verbal disputes of metaphysics, attempted to explore the secrets of the invisible world, and studied to reconcile Aristotle with Plato, on subjects of which both these philosophers were as ignorant as the rest of mankind.

If it were as easy in other matters to verify reasonings by experiments, there would not be such differing opinions. But the trouble is that experiments in physics are difficult and cost a great deal; and in metaphysics they are impossible, unless God out of love for us perform a miracle in order to acquaint us with remote immaterial things.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

With his ideas unfolded by education, sharpened by controversy, rectified by metaphysics, he [Man] may understand the natural world, but he cannot invent it.

William Whewell

An ideal and flawless freedom, "complete freedom", enabling without disabling, is I believe an oxymoron in metaphysics as much as it is an unreachable goal in social life.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil.

Science... deals exclusively with changes of configuration, and traces the accelerations which are observed to occur, leaving to metaphysics to deal with the underlying agency, if it exists.

C. Lloyd Morgan

We rationalize, we dissimilate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to split wide open, and reveal to us its roots and foundations, its old dark heart of metaphysics, mysticism, magic and myth.

A system of philosophy, or metaphysics, is a union of a world view and a life view in one harmonious, complete, integral conception. In so far as any man strives to attain, by rational inquiry, a consistent and comprehensive view of life and reality, he is a metaphysician.

Joseph Alexander Leighton

The unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the nonexistence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.

Thomas De Quincey

Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.

Robert M. Pirsig

My studies in speculative philosophy, metaphysics, and science are all summed up in the image of a mouse called man, running in and out of every hole in the cosmos hunting for the absolute cheese.

Benjamin De Casseres

Metaphysics has always been the ape of mathematics.

Charles Sanders Peirce