Philosophical Inquiry Quotes

I do not have it in for relativism. In many respects I find it a fascinating, even attractive, alternative. It engenders epistemological humility, defeats an arrogant pomposity in belief, even promotes a sort of democratic ideal in matters of knowledge. Perhaps its most comforting feature is that it requires no hard work at all in the matter of justifying beliefs. ~ David L. Wolfe

It is by no means certain that we advance our philosophical quest by reading Plato or Aristotle. It may increase our knowledge of history but not of the world. ~ Jostein Gaarder

In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle. ~ Charles Baudelaire

I've always hated the "Who are you?" question. This is a philosophical inquiry. Answering that question is why we're on earth. You can't answer it in thirty seconds or in an elevator. ~ Sandy Nathan

To deny the existence of a God and more specifically the Creator God of Christianity is not based upon a philosophical issue, but rather a moral one. ~ R. Alan Woods

Many great minds have been preoccupied with the notion of wholeness and how to realize it in one's own life. Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, held the meditative traditions of Asia in very high regard in this connection. He wrote, "This question [of coming to wholeness] has occupied the most adventurous minds of the East for more than two thousand years, and in this respect, methods and philosophical doctrines have been developed that simply put all Western attempts along these lines into the shade." Jung well understood the relationship between meditation practice and the realization of wholeness. Albert ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

Sometimes truths are what we run from, and sometimes they are what we seek. ~ R.D. Ronald

No one can steal your freedom from you. You can only give it away. ~ Bella James

True evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself. ~ E.A. Bucchianeri

Well, because it is provokingly wrong. I am a sort of negation of it." "You are very philosophical. 'A negation' is profound talking. ~ Thomas Hardy

Something important is lost if this man has been forced to deny his own nature. ~ Veronica Roth

Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area? ~ Asa Gray

As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years? ~ Criss Jami

One or another man, liberated or cursed, suddenly sees-but even this man sees rarely-that all we are is what we aren't, that we fool ourselves about what's true and are wrong about what we conclude is right. And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Even a pawn makes a move, sometimes two steps in the beginning. How small or limited it may be, it can never be overlooked. Remember, it is a pawn and only the pawn which gets promoted once it reaches the other side of the chessboard. If a pawn, saddened by its abilities, stops making any move, it can never evolve into something greater. We have to make moves, my friend, to progress. ~ Abhaidev

Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest. ~ Bion Of Borysthenes

I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen. ~ Anna Journey

I still lack a political, religious, and philosophical world view. I change it every month, so I'll have to limit myself to the description of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak. ~ Anton Chekhov

Now a life like that, he figured, could make one tentative and fearful perhaps. Or it could make you remarkably strong, and what people called philosophical---and fiercely independent. Maybe it could make you careless of your own life, indifferent to danger, and determined to live exactly as you pleased. ~ Anne Rice

I criticize by creation, not by finding fault. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Now if there is any gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things inasmuch as it is the best. But this question would perhaps be more appropriate to another inquiry; happiness seems, however, even if it is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning and training, to be among the most god-like things; for that which is the prize and end of virtue seems to be the best thing in the world, and something god-like and blessed. ~ Aristotle.

I'll be geeky right now too, because I love Sondheim. Anything he does I had a blast, because every time I do a show of his, I learn something about myself because he's philosophical. During that show, the cast was incredible Hugh and Dan Levine (who I played opposite of), all of us clicked and I love the show. ~ Kendra Kassebaum

The Scripture abounds in commands and cautions for our utmost diligence in our search and inquiry as to whether we are made partakers of Christ or not, or whether His Spirit dwells in us or not-which argue both the difficulty of attaining an assured confidence herein, as also the danger of our being mistaken, and yet the certainty of a good issue upon the diligent and regular use of means to that purpose. ~ John Owen

I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel. ~ Jenny Offill

The precepts of the law are these: to live honestly, to injure no one, and to give everyone else his due. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempest. ~ Epicurus

It is in the treatment of trifles that a person shows what they are. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Although you can find certain differences among the Buddhist philosophical schools about how the universe came into being, the basic common question addressed is how the two fundamental principles-external matter and internal mind or consciousness-although distinct, affect one another. External causes and conditions are responsible for certain of our experiences of happiness and suffering. Yet we find that it is principally our own feelings, our thoughts and our emotions, that really determine whether we are going to suffer or be happy. ~ Dalai Lama

Shake the hands of those you hate, and you will thank me ~ Cometan

The same word passed through three minds, simultaneously, philosophical, fatalistic, the eternal refuge of the Italian: Pazienza ... ~ Violet Trefusis

Driving a car provides a person with a rush of dopamine in the brain, which hormonal induced salience spurs modalities of creative and critical thinking regarding philosophical concepts such as truth, logical necessity, possibility, impossibility, chance, and contingency. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

If you only would!" He added rather diffidently: "If you would not mind remembering that I am a military court of inquiry. It makes it easier for me to report to the general if you say things dully and in the order that they happened. ~ Ford Madox Ford

Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade. ~ K. Hari Kumar

For many people, political, religious or philosophical opinions are, at bottom, very secondary matters, especially when the first flush of youth has passed and the age of practical occupations, of "business" comes. So, to some extent through indolence, to some extent through habit, partly again through mistaken pride and respect for so-called consistency of character, a man often ends, when no strong conflict with his interests is involved, by keeping all his life long a doctrine that he embraced in a moment of youthful impulse, devoting to it such little energy as the practical man is wont to set apart for what is called "the ideal. ~ Gaetano Mosca

I would very honestly just tell you that what I tried to do was simply respond to inquiries from people as they came in. Where I've thought I could say something useful, I've tried to add a voice that was, frankly, a dissident voice earlier on, but one that I think has become a more mainstream voice-and not because I've shifted. I think that the critique I had of what was going on in our financial system from six, eight years ago-after seeing some of what we've suffered through and even since the cataclysm itself-in terms of the structural changes. ~ Eliot Spitzer

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Someone sent me a Facebook post that summed up the dynamic in which we were caught:
BERNIE: I think America should get a pony.
HILLARY: How will you pay for the pony? Where will the pony come from? How will you get Congress to agree to the pony?
BERNIE: Hillary thinks America doesn't deserve a pony.
BERNIE SUPPORTERS: Hillary hates ponies!
HILLARY: Actually, I love ponies.
BERNIE SUPPORTERS: She changed her position on ponies! #whichhillary #witchhillary
HEADLINE: 'Hillary Refuses to Give Every American a Pony"
DEBATE MODERATOR: Hillary, how do you feel when people say you lie about ponies?
WEBSITE HEADLINE: 'Congressional Inquiry into Clinton's Pony Lies'
TWITTER TRENDING: #ponygate ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

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 someone is: It's creepy. ~ Ellen Barkin

To philosophize is to learn to die. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Your moral code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice…It demands that he starts, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an isolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold a man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality…To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason.

(The) myth decleares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a moral being…The evils for which they damn him are reasn, morality, creativeness, joy-all the cardinal values of his existence….the essence of his nature as a man. Whatever he was- that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love- he was not a man. ~ Ayn Rand

Many scientists think that philosophy has no place, so for me it's a sad time because the role of reflection, contemplation, meditation, self inquiry, insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, free will, is in a way not given any importance, which is the domain of philosophers. ~ Deepak Chopra

(...) one should never be too naive regarding the quality of the current philosophical culture, or imagine that the most recent thinking is in any meaningful sense more advanced or more authoritative than that of a century or a millennium or two millennia ago. There are certain perennial problems to which all interesting philosophy returns again and again; but there are no such things as logical discoveries that consign any of the older answers to obsolescence. Certain classical answers to those problems endure and recur, sometimes because they remain far more powerful than the answers (or evasions) produced by later schools of thought. And, conversely, weaker answers often enjoy greater favor than their rivals simply because they are in keeping with the prejudices of the age. ~ David Bentley Hart

The Antichrist, Section 7 ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Gregory of Nyssa, in contrast, tries to advance philosophical and theological arguments to prove that the pains of hell cannot be co-eternal with God. His main argument is based on the essential superiority of good over evil; for evil, in its essence, can never be absolute and unlimited. The sinner inevitably reaches a limit when all his evil is done and he cannot go farther, just as the night, after having reached its peak, turns toward the day.18 This reasoning corresponds to the example of a physician who allows a boil to mature until it can be lanced. Thus the Incarnation, too, occurred only when evil had reached its climax.19 Gregory's position has never been condemned. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. ~ Max Born

My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole. ~ Anne Lamott

Some people will hate you for pursuing what you love. Make sure you don't love them more. ~ Harsh Snehanshu

Empathy is the greatest good of all. ~ Cometan