This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of Philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my Readers against all those things which were the main designe ...
We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to ...
To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signi...
Why did a demon who possessed the savage strength of a werewolf also need such compelling beauty? It was one of those philosophical questions that had no answer. Like why Firefly had been canceled after just one season.
Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mank...
Philosophically murder is a religion. It's an idea, to end someone else's life because you think they've been immoral or you believe that murder is okay. In a great deal of cases murder is sociopathic. But for a man to take someone else's life, for t...
Philosophically, the universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, we've got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, it's one of a...
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is o...
A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists,...
Everything in balance, everything in moderation – try not to go over the top in any direction but be free to explore & enjoy. Live heart-fully. I’m a writer & philosopher, of course I have the right to invent words! I try not to do it carelessly,...
I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden. He says again and again, “I know that that’s a tree,” pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them, “This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing phil...
Well, I don't know if I can comment on Kant or Hegel because I'm no real philosopher in the sense of knowing what these people have said in any detail so let me not comment on that too much.
I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and ...
I've always felt like we're all human beings and we're all basically given the tools to make whatever choices we want to make. How we treat other people. How we treat ourselves. Just the whole philosophy of that and the philosophical logic of that is...
Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up, it may destroy you. To live a life of total moral rigor is not necessarily the way to go. It's the path for very few people. Most people need to come up with some kind of middle g...
I'd never say I'll never have a facelift, but I'm way too scared of looking like a different person. I have no philosophical or political position on plastic surgery; I just don't want to look crazy. And I don't like not being able to tell how old so...
I think that people, despite my law enforcement background, view me as taking these consistently progressive stands, and I think that, philosophically, there is a desire to get at that person. But I think the stands I have taken are totally consisten...
I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So...
Halley Reed: [on the philosopher Lewis Levy] He was very eloquent on the subject of love, didn't you think? Clifford Stern: I wish I had met him before I got married. It would've saved me a gall bladder operation.
I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, cu...
