Metaphysics Quotes

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Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

I am not much of a hand at love songs, you see I mingle metaphysics with even this, but perhaps in this age of Philosophy that may be excused.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.

Jorge Luis Borges

The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of today, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.

Some think to avoid the influence of metaphysical errors, by paying no attention to metaphysics; but experience shows that these men beyond all others are held in an iron vice of metaphysical theory, because by theories that they have never called in question.

Charles Sanders Peirce

We may agree, perhaps, to understand by Metaphysics an attempt to know reality as against mere appearance, or the study of first principles or ultimate truths, or again the effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piecemeal or by fragments, but somehow as a whole.

When a physicist refers to curvature of space he at once falls under suspicion of talking metaphysics.

Arthur Eddington

The God of metaphysics is but an idea. But the God of religion, the Maker of heaven and earth, the sovereign Judge of actions and thoughts, is a power.

No one who attentively examines the progress of any department of Science, save such as are (like Mathematics or Metaphysics) of a purely abstract character, can fail to perceive how much it is dependent upon the perfection of its instruments.

William Benjamin Carpenter