--- DICTIONARIES (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

metaphysical ::: highly abstract or theoretical; abstruse, relating to that which is immaterial or concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth. :::

metaphysically ::: adv. --> In the manner of metaphysical science, or of a metaphysician.

metaphysical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to metaphysics.
According to rules or principles of metaphysics; as, metaphysical reasoning.
Preternatural or supernatural.

metaphysician ::: n. --> One who is versed in metaphysics.

metaphysic ::: n. --> See Metaphysics. ::: a. --> Metaphysical.

metaphysics ::: n. --> The science of real as distinguished from phenomenal being; ontology; also, the science of being, with reference to its abstract and universal conditions, as distinguished from the science of determined or concrete being; the science of the conceptions and relations which are necessarily implied as true of every kind of being; phylosophy in general; first principles, or the science of first principles.
Hence: The scientific knowledge of mental phenomena;

metaphysics ::: Traditionally, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with issues of ontology (what is being or reality?) and epistemology (how do we know it?). In Integral Theory, any assertion without injunctions is considered metaphysics, or a meaningless assertion (i.e., postulating a referent for which there is no means of verification). The term is also used in its traditional sense given the lack of alternatives.

Metaphysical philosophy is an attempt to fix the fundamental realities and principles of being as distinct from its processes and the phenomena which result from those processes. But it is on the fundamental realities that the processes depend: our own process of life, its aim and method, should be in accordance with the truth of being that we see; otherwise our metaphysical truth can be only a play of the intellect without any dynamic importance.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 693

Metaphysical: Is the substantial essence of the whole thing -- as rational animal is said to bt the metaphysical form of man. -- H.G.

Metaphysics and psychology are not distinct in Herbert's view. In his day psychology was also philosophy. It was still a metaphysical science in the sense that it is differentiated from physical science. It was only later that psychology repudiated philosophy. Accepting Kant's challenge to make psychology a mathematical science, he developed an elaborate system of mathematical constructions that proved the least fruitful phase of his system. As a mathematical science psychology can use only calculation, not experiment. As the mind or soul is unitary, indivisible. science, including philosophy, is neither analytical nor experimental. Bv denying analysis to psychology, Herbart combatted the division of mind into separate faculties. Psychology is not the mere description of the mind, but the working out of its mathematical laws.

Metaphysics. Pure Idealism or Immaterialism identifies ontological reality (substance, substantives, concrete individuality) exclusively with the ideal, ie., Mind, Spirit, Soul, Person, Archetypal Ideas, Thought. See Spiritualism, Mentalism, Monadism, Panpsychtsm, Idealistic Phenomenalism. With respect to the metaphysical status of self-consciousness and purposeful activity, Idealism is either impersonalistic or personalistic. See Personalism.

Metaphysical deduction: An examination of the logical functions of thought that there are certain a priori forms of synthesis which belong to the very constitution, the bare, purely formal machinery of the understanding. -- H.H.

Metaphysical essence: (in Scholasticism) The complexus of notes which are in a thing, as it is conceived by us -- i.e. the principle and primary notes by which that thing is sufficiently understood and distinguished from other things. -- H.G.

Metaphysical ethics: Any view according to which ethics is a branch of metaphysics, ethical principles being derived from metaphysical principles and ethical notions being defined in terms of metaphysical notions. -- W.K.F.

Metaphysics: (Gr. meta ta Physika) Arbitrary title given by Andronicus of Rhodes, circa 70 B.C. to a certain collection of Aristotelean writings.

Metaphysically, the personal nature of the World Ground;

metaphysically ::: adv. --> In the manner of metaphysical science, or of a metaphysician.

metaphysical ::: a. --> Of or pertaining to metaphysics.
According to rules or principles of metaphysics; as, metaphysical reasoning.
Preternatural or supernatural.

metaphysician ::: n. --> One who is versed in metaphysics.

metaphysic ::: n. --> See Metaphysics. ::: a. --> Metaphysical.

metaphysics ::: n. --> The science of real as distinguished from phenomenal being; ontology; also, the science of being, with reference to its abstract and universal conditions, as distinguished from the science of determined or concrete being; the science of the conceptions and relations which are necessarily implied as true of every kind of being; phylosophy in general; first principles, or the science of first principles.
Hence: The scientific knowledge of mental phenomena;

Metaphysical dualism: The view that there are two realities—mind and matter, or God and the world-stuff.

Metaphysical naturalism: That view of reality which holds that reality is nature, and that the ultimate is found within the framework of nature.

Metaphysics: In general, the philosophical theory of reality. Defined variously as the rational science of the supernatural or supersensuous, the science of formal and final causes, the science of the obscure, occult or mysterious.

METAPHYSICS—The science of the first principles of being and of knowledge; the reasoned doctrine of the essential nature and fundamental relations of all that is real.

metaphysical: The word generally refers to a group of 17th century poets, who include Donne, Herbert and Marvell. Metaphysical poetry commonly has strikingimagery, which sometimes stems from new contemporary scientific and geographic discoveries, witty conceits, the contrast of the physical and the philosophical and a high impression of mortality. There is also flexibility in the meter and rhythmadopted.

metaphysical poetry: Poetry which uses logic and reason to construct an 'argument' and draws on other fields such as science, law, philosophy and exploration to describe emotion, often love.

metaphysical poets: Poets, usually writing in the 17th century and whose poetry utilises metaphysical imagery. Donne, Herbert, Marvell and Vaughan are among the best known metaphysical poets.

Metaphysic Trinity: The universal forces of Stasis, Dynamism and Entropy.

Metaphysic Trinity, the: Name for the interplay between the forces of change (Dynamism), form (Stasis), and decay (Entropy). Known by some primal mages as the Triat of Wyld, Weaver, and Wyrm.

metaphysics ::: Traditionally, metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with issues of ontology (what is being or reality?) and epistemology (how do we know it?). In Integral Theory, any assertion without injunctions is considered metaphysics, or a meaningless assertion (i.e., postulating a referent for which there is no means of verification). The term is also used in its traditional sense given the lack of alternatives.

metaphysical ::: highly abstract or theoretical; abstruse, relating to that which is immaterial or concerned with abstract thought or subjects, as existence, causality, or truth. :::

metaphysical naturalism ::: The belief that nature is in fact all that exists. The term applies to any worldview in which nature is all there is and all things supernatural do not exist (including spirits and souls, non-natural values, and universals as they are commonly conceived).

metaphysics ::: A traditional branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world that encompasses it,[18] although the term is not easily defined.[19] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:[20] Ultimately, what is there? and what is it like? A person who studies metaphysics is called a metaphysician.[21] The metaphysician attempts to clarify the fundamental notions by which people understand the world, e.g., existence, objects and their properties, space and time, cause and effect, and possibility. A central branch of metaphysics is ontology, the investigation into the basic categories of being and how they relate to each other. Another central branch of metaphysics is cosmology, the study of the origin, fundamental structure, nature, and dynamics of the universe. Some include epistemology as another central focus of metaphysics, but other philosophers question this.

--- QUOTES [18 / 18 - 500 / 1479] (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

KEYS (10k)

   6 Sri Aurobindo
   1 W. V. O Quine
   1 Voltaire
   1 Robert Anton Wilson
   1 R Buckminster Fuller
   1 Mortimer J Adler
   1 M Alan Kazlev
   1 Leonard Susskind
   1 Joseph Campbell
   1 J.K.F.
   1 Haruki Murakami
   1 Alfred Korzybski
   1 Aleister Crowley

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   11 Haruki Murakami

   10 Friedrich Nietzsche

   9 Voltaire

   7 Bertrand Russell

   7 Albert Camus

   6 Frederick Lenz

   6 Edward Abbey

   6 Arthur Schopenhauer

   6 Anonymous

   5 R Buckminster Fuller

   5 Immanuel Kant

   5 Fernando Pessoa

   5 Carl Jung

   5 Ayn Rand

   4 William James

   4 Ralph Waldo Emerson

   4 Ludwig Wittgenstein

   4 Jorge Luis Borges

   4 Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra

   4 Dalai Lama XIV

   4 Aldous Huxley

   3 Thomas Merton

   3 Stephen Batchelor

   3 Robert M Pirsig

   3 Marianne Williamson

   3 Maimonides

   3 Karl Popper

   3 Joseph Joubert

   3 Jean Paul Sartre

   3 Jack London

   3 G K Chesterton

   3 Emil M Cioran

   3 Charles Spurgeon

   3 Charles Darwin

   3 Auguste Comte

   3 Aristotle

   3 Antonin Artaud

   3 Allen W Wood

   3 Alfred North Whitehead

   2 Wilhelm Wundt

   2 Wilhelm Dilthey

   2 Wayne Coyne

   2 Walt Whitman

   2 Walter Isaacson

   2 Tom Robbins

   2 Thomas de Quincey

   2 Terry Eagleton

   2 Swami Vivekananda

   2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

   2 Ross Douthat

   2 Raymond M Smullyan

   2 Peter Wessel Zapffe

   2 Paul Kalanithi

   2 Ntozake Shange

   2 Neal Stephenson

   2 Melissa Scott

   2 Max Horkheimer

   2 Lord Kelvin

   2 Karl Marx

   2 Joseph Campbell

   2 John Adams

   2 Jodi Picoult

   2 J L Austin

   2 Iris Murdoch
   2 Henry James

   2 Hazrat Inayat Khan

   2 Gilbert K Chesterton

   2 George MacDonald

   2 Gabriel Marcel

   2 Fulton J Sheen

   2 Ernest Sosa

   2 David Hume

   2 C S Lewis

   2 Charles Simic

   2 Brittany Gibbons

   2 Arthur Koestler

   2 Annie Dillard

   2 Alfred North Whitehead
   2 Albert Einstein

1:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell,

2:When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics. ~ Voltaire,

3:Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction ~ R Buckminster Fuller,

4:There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations. ~ Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics ,

5:Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. ~ W. V. O Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism Questions And Answers 1950-1951,

6:The most general science. Pythagoras is said to have called himself a lover of wisdom. But philosophy has been both the seeking of wisdom and the wisdom sought. Originally, the rational explanation of anything, the general principles under which all facts could be explained; in this sense, indistinguishable from science. Later, the science of the first principles of being; the presuppositions of ultimate reality. Now, popularly, private wisdom or consolation; technically, the science of sciences, the criticism and systematization or organization of all knowledge, drawn from empirical science, rational learning, common experience, or whatever. Philosophy includes metaphysics, or ontology and epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, etc. (all of which see). ~ J.K.F., Dagoberts Dictionary of Philosophy ,

7:It has been argued that this is no relation peculiar to the constitution of humanity and its outlook upon an objective world, but the very nature of existence itself; all phenomenal existence consists of an observing consciousness and an active objectivity, and the Action cannot proceed without the Witness because the universe exists only in or for the consciousness that observes and has no independent reality. It has been argued in reply that the material universe enjoys an eternal self-existence: it was here before life and mind made their appearance; it will survive after they have disappeared and no longer trouble with their transient strivings and limited thoughts the eternal and inconscient rhythm of the suns. The difference, so metaphysical in appearance, is yet of the utmost practical import, for it determines the whole outlook of man upon life, the goal that he shall assign for his efforts and the field in which he shall circumscribe his energies. For it raises the question of the reality of cosmic existence and, more important still, the question of the value of human life. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine 2020-08-23,

8:Therefore the age of intuitive knowledge, represented by the early Vedantic thinking of the Upanishads, had to give place to the age of rational knowledge; inspired Scripture made room for metaphysical philosophy, even as afterwards metaphysical philosophy had to give place to experimental Science. Intuitive thought which is a messenger from the superconscient and therefore our highest faculty, was supplanted by the pure reason which is only a sort of deputy and belongs to the middle heights of our being; pure reason in its turn was supplanted for a time by the mixed action of the reason which lives on our plains and lower elevations and does not in its view exceed the horizon of the experience that the physical mind and senses or such aids as we can invent for them can bring to us. And this process which seems to be a descent, is really a circle of progress. For in each case the lower faculty is compelled to take up as much as it can assimilate of what the higher had already given and to attempt to re-establish it by its own methods. By the attempt it is itself enlarged in its scope and arrives eventually at a more supple and a more ample selfaccommodation to the higher faculties. ~ Sri Aurobindo, TLD 1.08-13 ,

9:Philosophy, as defined by Fichte, is the "science of sciences." Its aim was to solve the problems of the world. In the past, when all exact sciences were in their infancy, philosophy had to be purely speculative, with little or no regard to realities. But if we regard philosophy as a Mother science, divided into many branches, we find that those branches have grown so large and various, that the Mother science looks like a hen with her little ducklings paddling in a pond, far beyond her reach; she is unable to follow her growing hatchlings. In the meantime, the progress of life and science goes on, irrespective of the cackling of metaphysics. Philosophy does not fulfill her initial aim to bring the results of experimental and exact sciences together and to solve world problems. Through endless, scientific specialization scientific branches multiply, and for want of coordination the great world-problems suffer. This failure of philosophy to fulfill her boasted mission of scientific coordination is responsible for the chaos in the world of general thought. The world has no collective or organized higher ideals and aims, nor even fixed general purposes. Life is an accidental game of private or collective ambitions and greeds. ~ Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity ,

10:Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really oveR But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about. ~ Haruki Murakami,

11:The poet-seer sees differently, thinks in another way, voices himself in quite another manner than the philosopher or the prophet. The prophet announces the Truth as the Word, the Law or the command of the Eternal, he is the giver of the message; the poet shows us Truth in its power of beauty, in its symbol or image, or reveals it to us in the workings of Nature or in the workings of life, and when he has done that, his whole work is done; he need not be its explicit spokesman or its official messenger. The philosopher's business is to discriminate Truth and put its parts and aspects into intellectual relation with each other; the poet's is to seize and embody aspects of Truth in their living relations, or rather - for that is too philosophical a language - to see her features and, excited by the vision, create in the beauty of her image. No doubt, the prophet may have in him a poet who breaks out often into speech and surrounds with the vivid atmosphere of life the directness of his message; he may follow up his injunction "Take no thought for the morrow," by a revealing image of the beauty of the truth he enounces, in the life of Nature, in the figure of the lily, or link it to human life by apologue and parable. The philosopher may bring in the aid of colour and image to give some relief and hue to his dry light of reason and water his arid path of abstractions with some healing dew of poetry. But these are ornaments and not the substance of his work; and if the philosopher makes his thought substance of poetry, he ceases to be a philosophic thinker and becomes a poet-seer of Truth. Thus the more rigid metaphysicians are perhaps right in denying to Nietzsche the name of philosopher; for Nietzsche does not think, but always sees, turbidly or clearly, rightly or distortedly, but with the eye of the seer rather than with the brain of the thinker. On the other hand we may get great poetry which is full of a prophetic enthusiasm of utterance or is largely or even wholly philosophic in its matter; but this prophetic poetry gives us no direct message, only a mass of sublime inspirations of thought and image, and this philosophic poetry is poetry and lives as poetry only in so far as it departs from the method, the expression, the way of seeing proper to the philosophic mind. It must be vision pouring itself into thought-images and not thought trying to observe truth and distinguish its province and bounds and fences. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry ,

12:There is one fundamental perception indispensable towards any integral knowledge or many-sided experience of this Infinite. It is to realise the Divine in its essential self and truth unaltered by forms and phenomena. Otherwise we are likely to remain caught in the net of appearances or wander confusedly in a chaotic multitude of cosmic or particular aspects, and if we avoid this confusion, it will be at the price of getting chained to some mental formula or shut up in a limited personal experience. The one secure and all-reconciling truth which is the very foundation of the universe is this that life is the manifestation of an uncreated Self and Spirit, and the key to life's hidden secret is the true relation of this Spirit with its own created existences. There is behind all this life the look of an eternal Being upon its multitudinous becomings; there is around and everywhere in it the envelopment and penetration of a manifestation in time by an unmanifested timeless Eternal. But this knowledge is valueless for Yoga if it is only an intellectual and metaphysical notion void of life and barren of consequence; a mental realisation alone cannot be sufficient for the seeker. For what Yoga searches after is not truth of thought alone or truth of mind alone, but the dynamic truth of a living and revealing spiritual experience. There must awake in us a constant indwelling and enveloping nearness, a vivid perception, a close feeling and communion, a concrete sense and contact of a true and infinite Presence always and everywhere. That Presence must remain with us as the living, pervading Reality in which we and all things exist and move and act, and we must feel it always and everywhere, concrete, visible, inhabiting all things; it must be patent to us as their true Self, tangible as their imperishable Essence, met by us closely as their inmost Spirit. To see, to feel, to sense, to contact in every way and not merely to conceive this Self and Spirit here in all existences and to feel with the same vividness all existences in this Self and Spirit, is the fundamental experience which must englobe all other knowledge. This infinite and eternal Self of things is an omnipresent Reality, one existence everywhere; it is a single unifying presence and not different in different creatures; it can be met, seen or felt in its completeness in each soul or each form in the universe. For its infinity is spiritual and essential and not merely a boundlessness in Space or an endlessness in Time; the Infinite can be felt in an infinitesimal atom or in a second of time as convincingly as in the stretch of the aeons or the stupendous enormity of the intersolar spaces. The knowledge or experience of it can begin anywhere and express itself through anything; for the Divine is in all, and all is the Divine. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga The Yoga of Divine Works,

13:At it's narrowest (although this is a common and perhaps the official position; need to find ref in What is Enlightenment) "integral", "turquois" (Spiral Dynamics), and "second tier" (ditto) are all synonms, and in turn are equivalent to Wilber IV / AQAL/Wilber V "Post-metaphysical" AQAL. This is the position that "Integral = Ken Wilber". It constitutes a new philosophical school or meme-set, in the tradition of charismatic spiritual teachers of all ages, in which an articulate, brilliant, and popular figure would arise, and gather a following around him- or her-self. After the teacher passes on, their teaching remains through books and organisations dedicated to perpetuating that teaching; although without the brilliant light of the Founder, things generally become pretty stultifying, and there is often little or no original development. Even so, the books themselves continue to inspire, and many people benefit greatly from these tecahings, and can contact the original Light of the founders to be inspired by them on the subtle planes. Some late 19th, 20th, and early 21st century examples of such teachers, known and less well-known, are Blavatsky, Theon, Steiner, Aurobindo, Gurdjieff, Crowley, Alice Bailey, Carl Jung, Ann Ree Colton, and now Ken Wilber. Also, many popular gurus belong in this category. It could plausibly be suggested that the founders of the great world religions started out no different, but their teaching really caught on n a big way....At its broadest then, the Integral Community includes not only Wilber but those he cites as his influences and hold universal and evolutionary views or teachings, as well as those who, while influenced by him also differ somewhat, and even those like Arthur M Young that Wilber has apparently never heard of. Nevertheless, all share a common, evolutionary, "theory of everything" position, and, whilst they may differ on many details and even on many major points, taken together they could be considered a wave front for a new paradigm, a memetic revolution. I use the term Daimon of the Integral Movement to refer to the spiritual being or personality of light that is behind and working through this broader movement.Now, this doesn't mean that this daimon is necessarily a negative entity. I see a lot of promise, a lot of potential, in the Integral Approach. From what I feel at the moment, the Integral Deva is a force and power of good.But, as with any new spiritual or evolutionary development, there is duality, in that there are forces that hinder and oppose and distort, as well as forces that help and aid in the evolution and ultimate divinisation of the Earth and the cosmos. Thus even where a guru does give in the dark side (as very often happens with many gurus today) there still remains an element of Mixed Light that remains (one finds this ambiguity with Sai Baba, with Da Free John, and with Rajneesh); and we find this same ambiguity with the Integral Community regarding what seems to me a certain offputting devotional attitude towards Wilber himself. The light will find its way, regardless. However, an Intregral Movement that is caught up in worship of and obedience to an authority figure, will not be able to achieve what a movement unfettered by such shackles could. ~ M Alan Kazlev, Kheper Ken Wilber,

14:The supreme Truth aspect which thus manifests itself to us is an eternal and infinite and absolute self-existence, self-awareness, self-delight of being; this bounds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. This Self-existence reveals itself again in three terms of its essential nature,-self, conscious being or spirit, and God or the Divine Being. The Indian terms are more satisfactory,-Brahman the Reality is Atman, Purusha, Ishwara; for these terms grew from a root of Intuition and, while they have a comprehensive preciseness, are capable of a plastic application which avoids both vagueness in the use and the rigid snare of a too limiting intellectual concept. The Supreme Brahman is that which in Western metaphysics is called the Absolute: but Brahman is at the same time the omnipresent Reality in which all that is relative exists as its forms or its movements; this is an Absolute which takes all relativities in its embrace. [...] Brahman is the Consciousness that knows itself in all that exists; Brahman is the force that sustains the power of God and Titan and Demon, the Force that acts in man and animal and the forms and energies of Nature; Brahman is the Ananda, the secret Bliss of existence which is the ether of our being and without which none could breathe or live. Brahman is the inner Soul in all; it has taken a form in correspondence with each created form which it inhabits. The Lord of Beings is that which is conscious in the conscious being, but he is also the Conscious in inconscient things, the One who is master and in control of the many that are passive in the hands of Force-Nature. He is the Timeless and Time; He is Space and all that is in Space; He is Causality and the cause and the effect: He is the thinker and his thought, the warrior and his courage, the gambler and his dice-throw. All realities and all aspects and all semblances are the Brahman; Brahman is the Absolute, the Transcendent and incommunicable, the Supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that upholds all beings, but It is too the self of each individual: the soul or psychic entity is an eternal portion of the Ishwara; it is his supreme Nature or Consciousness-Force that has become the living being in a world of living beings. The Brahman alone is, and because of It all are, for all are the Brahman; this Reality is the reality of everything that we see in Self and Nature. Brahman, the Ishwara, is all this by his Yoga-Maya, by the power of his Consciousness-Force put out in self-manifestation: he is the Conscious Being, Soul, Spirit, Purusha, and it is by his Nature, the force of his conscious self-existence that he is all things; he is the Ishwara, the omniscient and omnipotent All-ruler, and it is by his Shakti, his conscious Power, that he manifests himself in Time and governs the universe. These and similar statements taken together are all-comprehensive: it is possible for the mind to cut and select, to build a closed system and explain away all that does not fit within it; but it is on the complete and many-sided statement that we must take our stand if we have to acquire an integral knowledge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine Book 02: The Knowledge and the Ignorance - The Spiritual Evolution,

15:Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]1. Homer - Iliad, Odyssey2. The Old Testament3. Aeschylus - Tragedies4. Sophocles - Tragedies5. Herodotus - Histories6. Euripides - Tragedies7. Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War8. Hippocrates - Medical Writings9. Aristophanes - Comedies10. Plato - Dialogues11. Aristotle - Works12. Epicurus - Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus13. Euclid - Elements14.Archimedes - Works15. Apollonius of Perga - Conic Sections16. Cicero - Works17. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things18. Virgil - Works19. Horace - Works20. Livy - History of Rome21. Ovid - Works22. Plutarch - Parallel Lives; Moralia23. Tacitus - Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania24. Nicomachus of Gerasa - Introduction to Arithmetic25. Epictetus - Discourses; Encheiridion26. Ptolemy - Almagest27. Lucian - Works28. Marcus Aurelius - Meditations29. Galen - On the Natural Faculties30. The New Testament31. Plotinus - The Enneads32. St. Augustine - On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine33. The Song of Roland34. The Nibelungenlied35. The Saga of Burnt Njal36. St. Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica37. Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy38. Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales39. Leonardo da Vinci - Notebooks40. Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy41. Desiderius Erasmus - The Praise of Folly42. Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres43. Thomas More - Utopia44. Martin Luther - Table Talk; Three Treatises45. François Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel46. John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion47. Michel de Montaigne - Essays48. William Gilbert - On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies49. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote50. Edmund Spenser - Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene51. Francis Bacon - Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis52. William Shakespeare - Poetry and Plays53. Galileo Galilei - Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences54. Johannes Kepler - Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World55. William Harvey - On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals56. Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan57. René Descartes - Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy58. John Milton - Works59. Molière - Comedies60. Blaise Pascal - The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises61. Christiaan Huygens - Treatise on Light62. Benedict de Spinoza - Ethics63. John Locke - Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education64. Jean Baptiste Racine - Tragedies65. Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology67.Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe68. Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal69. William Congreve - The Way of the World70. George Berkeley - Principles of Human Knowledge71. Alexander Pope - Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu - Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws73. Voltaire - Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary74. Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones75. Samuel Johnson - The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets ~ Mortimer J Adler,

16:It is natural from the point of view of the Yoga to divide into two categories the activities of the human mind in its pursuit of knowledge. There is the supreme supra-intellectual knowledge which concentrates itself on the discovery of the One and Infinite in its transcendence or tries to penetrate by intuition, contemplation, direct inner contact into the ultimate truths behind the appearances of Nature; there is the lower science which diffuses itself in an outward knowledge of phenomena, the disguises of the One and Infinite as it appears to us in or through the more exterior forms of the world-manifestation around us. These two, an upper and a lower hemisphere, in the form of them constructed or conceived by men within the mind's ignorant limits, have even there separated themselves, as they developed, with some sharpness.... Philosophy, sometimes spiritual or at least intuitive, sometimes abstract and intellectual, sometimes intellectualising spiritual experience or supporting with a logical apparatus the discoveries of the spirit, has claimed always to take the fixation of ultimate Truth as its province. But even when it did not separate itself on rarefied metaphysical heights from the knowledge that belongs to the practical world and the pursuit of ephemeral objects, intellectual Philosophy by its habit of abstraction has seldom been a power for life. It has been sometimes powerful for high speculation, pursuing mental Truth for its own sake without any ulterior utility or object, sometimes for a subtle gymnastic of the mind in a mistily bright cloud-land of words and ideas, but it has walked or acrobatised far from the more tangible realities of existence. Ancient Philosophy in Europe was more dynamic, but only for the few; in India in its more spiritualised forms, it strongly influenced but without transforming the life of the race.... Religion did not attempt, like Philosophy, to live alone on the heights; its aim was rather to take hold of man's parts of life even more than his parts of mind and draw them Godwards; it professed to build a bridge between spiritual Truth and the vital and material human existence; it strove to subordinate and reconcile the lower to the higher, make life serviceable to God, Earth obedient to Heaven. It has to be admitted that too often this necessary effort had the opposite result of making Heaven a sanction for Earth's desires; for, continually, the religious idea has been turned into an excuse for the worship and service of the human ego. Religion, leaving constantly its little shining core of spiritual experience, has lost itself in the obscure mass of its ever extending ambiguous compromises with life: in attempting to satisfy the thinking mind, it more often succeeded in oppressing or fettering it with a mass of theological dogmas; while seeking to net the human heart, it fell itself into pits of pietistic emotionalism and sensationalism; in the act of annexing the vital nature of man to dominate it, it grew itself vitiated and fell a prey to all the fanaticism, homicidal fury, savage or harsh turn for oppression, pullulating falsehood, obstinate attachment to ignorance to which that vital nature is prone; its desire to draw the physical in man towards God betrayed it into chaining itself to ecclesiastic mechanism, hollow ceremony and lifeless ritual. The corruption of the best produced the worst by that strange chemistry of the power of life which generates evil out of good even as it can also generate good out of evil. At the same time in a vain effort at self-defence against this downward gravitation, Religion was driven to cut existence into two by a division of knowledge, works, art, life itself into two opposite categories, the spiritual and the worldly, religious and mundane, sacred and profane; but this defensive distinction itself became conventional and artificial and aggravated rather than healed the disease.... On their side Science and Art and the knowledge of Life, although at first they served or lived in the shadow of Religion, ended by emancipating themselves, became estranged or hostile, or have even recoiled with indifference, contempt or scepticism from what seem to them the cold, barren and distant or unsubstantial and illusory heights of unreality to which metaphysical Philosophy and Religion aspire. For a time the divorce has been as complete as the one-sided intolerance of the human mind could make it and threatened even to end in a complete extinction of all attempt at a higher or a more spiritual knowledge. Yet even in the earthward life a higher knowledge is indeed the one thing that is throughout needful, and without it the lower sciences and pursuits, however fruitful, however rich, free, miraculous in the abundance of their results, become easily a sacrifice offered without due order and to false gods; corrupting, hardening in the end the heart of man, limiting his mind's horizons, they confine in a stony material imprisonment or lead to a final baffling incertitude and disillusionment. A sterile agnosticism awaits us above the brilliant phosphorescence of a half-knowledge that is still the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1,

17:For instance, a popular game with California occultists-I do not know its inventor-involves a Magic Room, much like the Pleasure Dome discussed earlier except that this Magic Room contains an Omniscient Computer. To play this game, you simply "astrally project" into the Magic Room. Do not ask what "astral projection" means, and do not assume it is metaphysical (and therefore either impossible, if you are a materialist, or very difficult, if you are a mystic). Just assume this is a gedankenexperiment, a "mind game." Project yourself, in imagination, into this Magic Room and visualize vividly the Omniscient Computer, using the details you need to make such a super-information-processor real to your fantasy. You do not need any knowledge of programming to handle this astral computer. It exists early in the next century; you are getting to use it by a species of time-travel, if that metaphor is amusing and helpful to you. It is so built that it responds immediately to human brain-waves, "reading" them and decoding their meaning. (Crude prototypes of such computers already exist.) So, when you are in this magic room, you can ask this Computer anything, just by thinking of what you want to know. It will read your thought, and project into your brain, by a laser ray, the correct answer. There is one slight problem. The computer is very sensitive to all brain-waves. If you have any doubts, it registers them as negative commands, meaning "Do not answer my question." So, the way to use it is to start simply, with "easy" questions. Ask it to dig out of the archives the name of your second-grade teacher. (Almost everybody remembers the name of their first grade teacher-imprint vulnerability again-but that of the second grade teacher tends to get lost.) When the computer has dug out the name of your second grade teacher, try it on a harder question, but not one that is too hard. It is very easy to sabotage this machine, but you don't want to sabotage it during these experiments. You want to see how well it can be made to perform. It is wise to ask only one question at a time, since it requires concentration to keep this magic computer real on the field of your perception. Do not exhaust your capacities for imagination and visualization on your first trial runs. After a few trivial experiments of the second-grade-teacher variety, you can try more interesting programs. Take a person toward whom you have negative feelings, such as anger, disappointment, feeling-of-betrayal, jealousy or whatever interferes with the smooth, tranquil operation of your own bio-computer. Ask the Magic Computer to explain that other person to you; to translate you into their reality-tunnel long enough for you to understand how events seem to them. Especially, ask how you seem to them. This computer will do that job for you; but be prepared for some shocks which might be disagreeable at first. This super-brain can also perform exegesis on ideas that seem obscure, paradoxical or enigmatic to us. For instance, early experiments with this computer can very profitably turn on asking it to explain some of the propositions in this book which may seem inexplicable or perversely wrong-headed to you, such as "We are all greater artists than we realize" or "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" or "mind and its contents are functionally identical." This computer is much more powerful and scientifically advanced than the rapture-machine in the neurosomatic circuit. It has total access to all the earlier, primitive circuits, and overrules any of them. That is, if you put a meta-programming instruction into this computer; it will relay it downward to the old circuits and cancel contradictory programs left over from the past. For instance, try feeding it on such meta-programming instructions as: 1. I am at cause over my body. 2. I am at cause over my imagination. 3.1 am at cause over my future. 4. My mind abounds with beauty and power. 5.1 like people, and people like me. Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels. This represents cybernetic consciousness; the programmer becoming self-programmer, self-metaprogrammer, meta-metaprogrammer, etc. Just as the emotional compulsions of the second circuit seem primitive, mechanical and, ultimately, silly to the neurosomatic consciousness, so, too, the reality maps of the third circuit become comic, relativistic, game-like to the metaprogrammer. "Whatever you say it is, it isn't, " Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves. "Neti, neti" (not that, not that), Hindu teachers traditionally say when asked what "God" is or what "Reality" is. Yogis, mathematicians and musicians seem more inclined to develop meta-programming consciousness than most of humanity. Korzybski even claimed that the use of mathematical scripts is an aid to developing this circuit, for as soon as you think of your mind as mind 1, and the mind which contemplates that mind as mind2 and the mind which contemplates mind2 contemplating mind 1 as mind3, you are well on your way to meta-programming awareness. Alice in Wonderland is a masterful guide to the metaprogramming circuit (written by one of the founders of mathematical logic) and Aleister Crowley soberly urged its study upon all students of yoga. ~ Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising ,

18:SECTION 1. Books for Serious Study Liber CCXX. (Liber AL vel Legis.) The Book of the Law. This book is the foundation of the New Æon, and thus of the whole of our work. The Equinox. The standard Work of Reference in all occult matters. The Encyclopaedia of Initiation. Liber ABA (Book 4). A general account in elementary terms of magical and mystical powers. In four parts: (1) Mysticism (2) Magical (Elementary Theory) (3) Magick in Theory and Practice (this book) (4) The Law. Liber II. The Message of the Master Therion. Explains the essence of the new Law in a very simple manner. Liber DCCCXXXVIII. The Law of Liberty. A further explanation of The Book of the Law in reference to certain ethical problems. Collected Works of A. Crowley. These works contain many mystical and magical secrets, both stated clearly in prose, and woven into the Robe of sublimest poesy. The Yi King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XVI], Oxford University Press.) The "Classic of Changes"; give the initiated Chinese system of Magick. The Tao Teh King. (S. B. E. Series [vol. XXXIX].) Gives the initiated Chinese system of Mysticism. Tannhäuser, by A. Crowley. An allegorical drama concerning the Progress of the Soul; the Tannhäuser story slightly remodelled. The Upanishads. (S. B. E. Series [vols. I & XV.) The Classical Basis of Vedantism, the best-known form of Hindu Mysticism. The Bhagavad-gita. A dialogue in which Krishna, the Hindu "Christ", expounds a system of Attainment. The Voice of the Silence, by H.P. Blavatsky, with an elaborate commentary by Frater O.M. Frater O.M., 7°=48, is the most learned of all the Brethren of the Order; he has given eighteen years to the study of this masterpiece. Raja-Yoga, by Swami Vivekananda. An excellent elementary study of Hindu mysticism. His Bhakti-Yoga is also good. The Shiva Samhita. An account of various physical means of assisting the discipline of initiation. A famous Hindu treatise on certain physical practices. The Hathayoga Pradipika. Similar to the Shiva Samhita. The Aphorisms of Patanjali. A valuable collection of precepts pertaining to mystical attainment. The Sword of Song. A study of Christian theology and ethics, with a statement and solution of the deepest philosophical problems. Also contains the best account extant of Buddhism, compared with modern science. The Book of the Dead. A collection of Egyptian magical rituals. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, by Eliphas Levi. The best general textbook of magical theory and practice for beginners. Written in an easy popular style. The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. The best exoteric account of the Great Work, with careful instructions in procedure. This Book influenced and helped the Master Therion more than any other. The Goetia. The most intelligible of all the mediæval rituals of Evocation. Contains also the favourite Invocation of the Master Therion. Erdmann's History of Philosophy. A compendious account of philosophy from the earliest times. Most valuable as a general education of the mind. The Spiritual Guide of [Miguel de] Molinos. A simple manual of Christian Mysticism. The Star in the West. (Captain Fuller). An introduction to the study of the Works of Aleister Crowley. The Dhammapada. (S. B. E. Series [vol. X], Oxford University Press). The best of the Buddhist classics. The Questions of King Milinda. (S. B. E. Series [vols. XXXV & XXXVI].) Technical points of Buddhist dogma, illustrated bydialogues. Liber 777 vel Prolegomena Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticæ Viæ Explicandæ, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicam Sanctissimorum Scientiæ Summæ. A complete Dictionary of the Correspondences of all magical elements, reprinted with extensive additions, making it the only standard comprehensive book of reference ever published. It is to the language of Occultism what Webster or Murray is to the English language. Varieties of Religious Experience (William James). Valuable as showing the uniformity of mystical attainment. Kabbala Denudata, von Rosenroth: also The Kabbalah Unveiled, by S.L. Mathers. The text of the Qabalah, with commentary. A good elementary introduction to the subject. Konx Om Pax [by Aleister Crowley]. Four invaluable treatises and a preface on Mysticism and Magick. The Pistis Sophia [translated by G.R.S. Mead or Violet McDermot]. An admirable introduction to the study of Gnosticism. The Oracles of Zoroaster [Chaldæan Oracles]. An invaluable collection of precepts mystical and magical. The Dream of Scipio, by Cicero. Excellent for its Vision and its Philosophy. The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, by Fabre d'Olivet. An interesting study of the exoteric doctrines of this Master. The Divine Pymander, by Hermes Trismegistus. Invaluable as bearing on the Gnostic Philosophy. The Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, reprint of Franz Hartmann. An invaluable compendium. Scrutinium Chymicum [Atalanta Fugiens]¸ by Michael Maier. One of the best treatises on alchemy. Science and the Infinite, by Sidney Klein. One of the best essays written in recent years. Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus [A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus &c. &c. &c.], by Richard Payne Knight [and Thomas Wright]. Invaluable to all students. The Golden Bough, by J.G. Frazer. The textbook of Folk Lore. Invaluable to all students. The Age of Reason, by Thomas Paine. Excellent, though elementary, as a corrective to superstition. Rivers of Life, by General Forlong. An invaluable textbook of old systems of initiation. Three Dialogues, by Bishop Berkeley. The Classic of Subjective Idealism. Essays of David Hume. The Classic of Academic Scepticism. First Principles by Herbert Spencer. The Classic of Agnosticism. Prolegomena [to any future Metaphysics], by Immanuel Kant. The best introduction to Metaphysics. The Canon [by William Stirling]. The best textbook of Applied Qabalah. The Fourth Dimension, by [Charles] H. Hinton. The best essay on the subject. The Essays of Thomas Henry Huxley. Masterpieces of philosophy, as of prose. ~ Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA Appendix I: Literature Recommended to Aspirants,

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Metaphysics is a science. ~ Gabriel Marcel

2:Physics, beware of metaphysics. ~ Isaac Newton

3:Love is metaphysical gravity. ~ R Buckminster Fuller

4:Love is a metaphysical gravity. ~ R Buckminster Fuller

5:Logic works, metaphysics contemplates. ~ Joseph Joubert

6:Mathematics is the only good metaphysics. ~ Lord Kelvin

7:Mathematics is the only true metaphysics. ~ Lord Kelvin

8:The irrational haunts the metaphysical. ~ Annie Dillard

9:I'm only a girl with metaphysical soles. ~ Haruki Murakami

10:Metaphysics keeps surviving its obituaries. ~ Mason Cooley

11:Without forgiveness, metaphysics are useless. ~ Gary Renard

12:All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics. ~ William Blake

13:Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics… ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

14:I only want to give a metaphysic for my music. ~ Gyorgy Ligeti

15:Pangloss taught metaphysico-theologo-cosmonigology. ~ Voltaire

16:Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics ~ Gary Snyder

17:Religion is the metaphysics of the masses. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

18:The bed is a metaphysical piece of furniture. ~ Nelson Rodrigues

19:Christianity is the hangman's metaphysics... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

20:Christianity is a metaphysics of the hangman. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

21:What I am trying to do is to unmuddle the metaphysical. ~ Wayne Dyer

22:Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

23:Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability. ~ Rudolf Carnap

24:Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist. ~ Albert Einstein

25:In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black. ~ Terry Eagleton

26:Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates. ~ Fernando Pessoa

27:Ordinary language embodies the metaphysics of the Stone Age. ~ J L Austin

28:Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things. ~ Edward Abbey

29:There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything. ~ Alberto Caeiro

30:. . . . metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. ~ G K Chesterton

31:There’s enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything. ~ Fernando Pessoa

32:All that exists is metaphysically true and metaphysically good. ~ Peter Kreeft

33:It is at once imaginative and metaphysical,—in short, Greek. ~ Herman Melville

34:Laughter is the real religion. Everything else is just metaphysics. ~ Rajneesh

35:Metaphysics is never more than semantic pleasantries anyway. ~ Haruki Murakami

36:Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind. ~ Thomas Carlyle

37:Sleeplessness is like metaphysics. Be there. -Charles Simic ~ Charles Simic

38:A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility. ~ John Keats

39:Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it. ~ Claes Oldenburg

40:I have described religion as the metaphysics of the people. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

41:The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics. ~ Albert Einstein

42:According to metaphysics, fear is caused by the lack of light. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

43:Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is. ~ Voltaire

44:In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean. ~ Edward Abbey

45:Always beware of turning religion into metaphysics: Morality is its essence. ~ Voltaire

46:On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds. ~ Julio Cort zar

47:He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke. ~ Charles Darwin

48:I always thought of metaphysics as a prolonged form of latent madness. ~ Fernando Pessoa

49:souls should, by definition, also teach about “the metaphysical dimensions ~ John Medina

50:Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make. ~ Gaston Bachelard

51:The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. ~ Alan Watts

52:metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. ~ Fernando Pessoa

53:morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. ~ Walt Whitman

54:The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity. ~ Alan W Watts

55:A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity. ~ Raymond M Smullyan

56:A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books. ~ Walt Whitman

57:It is right that we be concerned with the scientific probity of metaphysics. ~ Gabriel Marcel

58:Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. ~ William James

59:Religion is the only metaphysic that the multitude can understand and adopt. ~ Joseph Joubert

60:I only read biographies, metaphysics and psychology. I can dream up my own fiction. ~ Mae West

61:Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical. ~ Thomas de Quincey

62:Maybe I'd spent too much time considering the metaphysical implications of heat. ~ Kami Garcia

63:One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions. ~ Arthur Koestler

64:metaphysics by showing that these theories are not just false, but unintelligible. ~ David Hume

65:The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

66:We must not think of this merely as a theological or metaphysical question. For ~ Roger Scruton

67:Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

68:Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth. ~ Bertrand Russell

69:I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it. ~ Robert M Pirsig

70:But you are metaphysical, Otto. You ought to think about her in more simple terms. ~ Iris Murdoch

71:Vedanta is the most impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

72:Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages. ~ Benjamin Lee Whorf

73:We are not called to proclaim philosophy and metaphysics, but the simple gospel. ~ Charles Spurgeon

74:Metaphysics must be based on what exists, for it has the task of explicating it. ~ Franz Grillparzer

75:To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction. ~ Fernando Pessoa

76:we can only re-establish metaphysics today by returning to realism pure and simple. ~ tienne Gilson

77:As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object. ~ Haruki Murakami

78:Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics. ~ Karl Kraus

79:I acknowledge that four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what our soul is. ~ Voltaire

80:What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

81:Culture must have its ultimate aim in the metaphysical or it will cease to be culture. ~ Johan Huizinga

82:The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper. ~ Edward Dahlberg

83:"Our psychology is . . . a science of mere phenomena without any metaphysical implications." ~ Carl Jung

84:Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. ~ Henry James

85:When Life comes to feed, make sure you are not the main course. - Metaphysical Minute ~ Dannye Williamsen

86:Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content. ~ Fulton J Sheen

87:Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments. ~ Ayn Rand

88:Don't call me babe. And next time I'm letting my Metaphysical answering meachine get it. ~ Dana Marie Bell

89:I don't know my why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is. ~ Bob Dylan

90:I stress the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and its metaphysical and mythic content. ~ Arthur Boyd

91:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell

92:Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food. ~ Robert M Pirsig

93:Not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysicks, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick, or Logick. ~ Robert Hooke

94:One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers. ~ James Russell Lowell

95:The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant. ~ Joseph Campbell,

96:Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties. ~ Charles Spurgeon

97:I saw that locked up in his nineteenth-century metaphysical illusions he was unapproachable. ~ Susan Howatch

98:Brain deals exclusively with the physical, and mind exclusively with the metaphysical. ~ R Buckminster Fuller

99:Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories. ~ Aldous Huxley

100:I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics. ~ Michel de Montaigne

101:Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. ~ Edmund Burke

102:If the expression "metaphysical exile" had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one. ~ Emil M Cioran

103:To create a healthy philosophy you should renounce metaphysics but be a good mathematician. ~ Bertrand Russell

104:I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person ~ Emile M Cioran

105:Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. ~ Immanuel Kant

106:Music is the occult metaphysical exercise of a soul not knowing that it philosophizes. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

107:That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden me by my doctor, my stomach won't take it. ~ Boris Pasternak

108:Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions. ~ Raymond Smullyan

109:Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible. ~ H L Mencken

110:All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it. ~ Thomas de Quincey

111:Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

112:Rationalism and Newtonian science has lured us into dark woods, but a new metaphysics can rescue us. ~ Huston Smith

113:I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we're always being asked to choose one over the other. ~ Bell Hooks

114:No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

115:The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must. ~ Edward Abbey

116:A metaphysical conclusion is either a false conclusion or a concealed experimental conclusion. ~ Hermann von Helmholtz

117:Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized. ~ Allen W Wood

118:To confront the metaphysics I have created for myself, in accordance with the void I carry within me. ~ Antonin Artaud

119:It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct. ~ W Somerset Maugham

120:Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it. ~ Hannah Arendt

121:The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it. ~ Edward Abbey

122:Do I look like a metaphysician?” “You look like a guy in an office. What exactly do you do there, Wilf? ~ William Gibson

123:idea accepted without question by most scientists—“is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact. ~ Michael Pollan

124:On the metaphysical front, the burning of sage is unsucessful. House reeks of doom, and now sage too. ~ Suzanne Finnamore

125:The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. ~ Emmanuel Levinas

126:A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task. ~ Ernst J nger

127:Epistemic competence might be posterior to knowledge conceptually, however, while still prior metaphysically. ~ Ernest Sosa

128:Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

129:So Whitehead's metaphysics doesn't fit very well on to physics as we understand the process of the world. ~ John Polkinghorne

130:That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical. ~ R Buckminster Fuller

131:The main feature should be the teaching of principles through stories. Don't make it metaphysical at all. ~ Swami Vivekananda

132:The pain is indescribable… physical, mental… metaphysical… it is everywhere, seeping into the marrow of my bones. ~ Anonymous

133:A precise language awaits a completed metaphysics. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

134:By what he chooses to present and by how he presents it, any author expresses his fundamental, metaphysical values. ~ Ayn Rand

135:When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is Metaphysics. ~ Voltaire

136:Being alive and being a woman is all I got but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet ~ Ntozake Shange

137:It's complicated. On the one hand we're killer apes, and on the other hand we have this metaphysical longing. ~ Simon Critchley

138:The problem arises when reductionism, which is essentially a method, is turned into a metaphysical standpoint. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

139:The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical. ~ Barnett Newman

140:As if someone, on top of a metaphysical hill, holding a metaphysical machine gun, had sprayed us with bullets. ~ Haruki Murakami

141:Being alive and being a woman is all I got but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet. ~ Ntozake Shange

142:Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing. ~ P D James

143:The rest is abortion and not-yet-science: which is to say metaphysics, theology, psychology, epistemology. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

144:I don't feel there is any spiritual or metaphysical justification for turning our backs on human suffering. ~ Marianne Williamson

145:In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds. ~ Antonin Artaud

146:It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ― Aristotle, Metaphysics ~ Penny Reid

147:Thus the metaphysical took the measure of, and mastered, the physical. ~ Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

148:To make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning ~ Paul Kalanithi

149:When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.    ~ Voltaire,

150:Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes. ~ Bertrand Russell

151:I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me. ~ Woody Allen

152:Logic has its use and metaphysics has its use, but neither of them is of much help in the making of a creed. ~ Thomas De Witt Talmage

153:The only freedom that exists is of a metaphysical character. In the physical world freedom is an impossibility. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

154:метафизика существует если не как наука, то во всяком случае как природная склонность [человека] (metaphysica naturalis). ~ Anonymous

155:I have come to the conclusion that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research programme. ~ Karl Popper

156:Metaphysics,--the science which determines what can and what cannot be known of being and the laws of being. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

157:She hated the namelessness of women in stories, as if they lived and died so that men could have metaphysical insights. ~ Chad Harbach

158:Theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics are merely ways for God to have his smart people believe in him ~ Jeremy Aldana

159:When spiritual, metaphysical, material, or immaterial events come into my life, I can only fix them by way of painting. ~ Max Beckmann

160:By mundane is meant not the physical worlds but the metaphysical system, of which the physical creation is the lowest or seventh part..

161:Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. ~ Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals, p. 236.

162:The demarcation between science and metaphysics is determined by the limits of experiential inquiry, not Nature or God. ~ B Alan Wallace

163:If one regards life and death as natural processes, the metaphysical dread vanishes, and one obtains peace of mind. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

164:Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

165:Women in love are pathetic and I cannot be bothered, for now, I am back to metaphysics and my armpits gather hair. ~ Mie Hansson

166:The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably. Unlike me. ~ Haruki Murakami

167:I am so accustomed to living on a metaphysical trapeze that I forget that other people tend to enjoy more solid ground ~ Audrey Niffenegger

168:One of the basic tenets of all metaphysical systems of thought is that we create our own reality in accord with our beliefs. ~ Mary K Greer

169:The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing. ~ Wilhelm Dilthey

170:The view that all mental processes are necessarily physical processes is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

171:Architecture is bound to situation. And I feel like the site is a metaphysical link, a poetic link, to what a building can be. ~ Steven Holl

172:Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary. ~ Albert Camus

173:In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant. ~ Lionel Trilling

174:Origin of man now proved. Metaphysics must flourish. He who understand baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke. ~ Charles Darwin

175:Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems. ~ Aldous Huxley

176:Experimental psychology itself has, it is true, now and again suffered relapse into a metaphysical treatment of its problems. ~ Wilhelm Wundt

177:Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke. ~ Charles Darwin

178:Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history. ~ Albert Camus

179:All that impedes thee from the golden round, Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem (25) To have thee crowned withal. ~ William Shakespeare

180:Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785) ~ Immanuel Kant

181:......Hudson says that many times in his life he undertook the study of metaphysics, but happiness always interrupted him. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

182:Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

183:Bouldering isn't really a sport. It's a climbing activity with metaphysical, mystical, and philosophical overtones." -John Gill- ~ Jon Krakauer

184:I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem. ~ Elliott Sober

185:Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek. ~ Ameen Rihani

186:I have deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I have been elected by God to do. ~ Clive Barker

187:I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much. ~ Sam Keen

188:Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power. ~ John Adams

189:The devotee of myth is in a way a philosopher, for myth is made up of things that cause wonder. (Metaphysics, I, 982b 18–19) ~ Aristotle

190:The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers are what novels are for women. ~ Voltaire

191:The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively from the facts of experience. ~ Jack London

192:When one man speaks to another man who doesn't understand him, and when a man who's speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics. ~ Voltaire

193:Explanations of thoughts as the product of some deeper force such as the soul, he felt, were really the realm of metaphysics. ~ Tom Butler Bowdon

194:The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics. ~ Maim nides

195:The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics. ~ Iain McGilchrist

196:Dostoevsky - is not a realist as an artist, he is an experimentator, a creator of an experimential metaphysics of human nature. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

197:Go beyond science, into the region of metaphysics. Real religion is beyond argument. It can only be lived both inwardly and outwardly. ~ Sivananda

198:I think that secular liberals need to recognize that they are still, often, hanging their worldview on what are metaphysical ideas. ~ Ross Douthat

199:The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

200:The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics. ~ Mircea Eliade

201:they propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds. ~ C S Lewis

202:Go ahead; take Kant's PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE METAPHYSIC and get it to show what he is telling. We would all be a lot happier. ~ Natalie Goldberg

203:They seek neither truth nor likelihood; they seek astonishment. They think metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy ~ Jorge Luis Borges

204:He, however, who begins with Metaphysics, will not only become confused in matters of religion, but will fall into complete infidelity. ~ Maimonides

205:I am too far away now from it all,’ Lymond said. ‘And if we are going to be metaphysical, I have no sea card, or compass, or star. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

206:It's progress I think, that science has joined philosophy, metaphysics & religion as subjects drunk people argue about in bars. ~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

207:Have the courage to use your own reason- That is the motto of enlightenment. "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" (1785) ~ Immanuel Kant

208:Humanists hold that ethical values are relative to human experience and need not be derived from theological or metaphysical foundations. ~ Paul Kurtz

209:The Bible is really a textbook of metaphysics, a manual for the growth of the soul, and it looks at all questions from this point of view. ~ Emmet Fox

210:To free "God" from his quotation marks would require nothing less than to free him from metaphysics, hence from the Being of beings. ~ Jean Luc Marion

211:he was more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations than metaphysical abstractions or deductive proofs. The ~ Walter Isaacson

212:In a world where everything is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning ~ Albert Camus

213:Thus, although OSR entails ESR, the two remain at odds insofar as the former adopts a definite metaphysical stance that the latter eschews. ~ Anonymous

214:What heart in the kingdom of heaven would ever dream of constructing a metaphysical system of what we owed to God and why we owed it? ~ George MacDonald

215:For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas. ~ Charles Simic

216:Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it. ~ Lawrence M Krauss

217:She’s got this ability to shut me up when I start fretting over metaphysical questions, such as, “What is the nature of the universe? ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

218:Certain brands of guilt can be inculcated in a secular way but other brands of guilt can only be obtained with reference to the metaphysical. ~ Sarah Ruhl

219:From the metaphysical point of view there is nothing that can touch the formless except the art of music which in itself is formless. ~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

220:The metaphysician knows that all disease has a mental correspondence, and in order to heal the body one must first "heal the soul. ~ Florence Scovel Shinn

221:God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven. ~ George MacDonald

222:[W]hereas the truths of science are communicable, … mythology and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination. ~ Joseph Campbell

223:Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. ~ Auguste Comte

224:Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy. ~ Bertrand Russell

225:Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them. ~ Aristotle

226:Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism. ~ Tim Crane

227:Philosophers, especially metaphysicians, explore features of reality and of our mental life that are different from those explored by scientists. ~ L A Paul

228: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

229:What I can and cannot imagine is a psychological fact about me. It is not a deep metaphysical fact about the nature of the universe. ~ Patricia S Churchland

230:What the hell, it always rains in sad love stories. And in happy ones too. Must be a reason, though perhaps not necessarily metaphysical. ~ Raymond Federman

231:For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey. ~ Joseph Brodsky

232:Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense, the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction. ~ Kate Wilhelm

233:Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretical stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage. ~ Auguste Comte

234:Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind. ~ Sir William Hamilton 9th Baronet

235:the tradition discourages attachments to any particular ideas of enlightenment as well as to pointless philosophical or metaphysical speculation. ~ Gil Fronsdal

236:I’ve actually long suspected there was a skinny girl inside me, but not in a metaphysical way. More like I probably had a twin, but I ate her. ~ Brittany Gibbons

237: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

238:Music has the power to transcend your physical being and take you up. Because music has a metaphysical quality it really makes your life beautiful. ~ Wayne Coyne

239:When we mediate, we are raising the kundalini through focus, through concentration. There is a metaphysical astral process that's taking place. ~ Frederick Lenz

240:...It was then, for the first time, that she understood above all her virtues what was in command was the vanity of a metaphysical woman. ~ Gabriel Garc a M rquez

241:Kant can provide, and has provided, a good model for philosophers to think about the relation of metaphysics to science and scientific methodology. ~ Allen W Wood

242:If the aim of physical theories is to explain experimental laws, theoretical physics is not an autonomous science; it is subordinate to metaphysics. ~ Pierre Duhem

243:That Hegel is a metaphysician, and that he thinks metaphysics is fundamental to philosophy, is plain enough from his definition of philosophy. ~ Frederick C Beiser

244:Hence, in shorthand, the meaning of a statement is the injunction of its enactment. No injunction, no enactment, no meaning. That is, mere metaphysics. ~ Ken Wilber

245:Probably there was a beginning-it is a metaphysical question, worthy a theologian-species have begun and ended-but the analogy is faint and distant. ~ Charles Lyell

246:When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical. ~ Albert Camus

247:Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former. ~ David Bentley Hart

248: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

249:In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe. ~ Albert Camus

250:What is it that makes a person insist passionately on the existence of metaphysical realities that can be neither demonstrated nor refuted? (176) ~ Stephen Batchelor

251:It is the basic, metaphysical fact of man's nature -- the connection between his survival and his use of reason -- that capitalism recognizes and protects. ~ Ayn Rand

252:It should be added that, in general, it is the character of every metaphysical and theological argument to seek to explain one absurdity by another. ~ Mikhail Bakunin

253:I’ve actually long suspected there was a skinny girl inside me, but not in a metaphysical way. More like I probably had a twin, but I ate her. This ~ Brittany Gibbons

254:Hell, like heaven, is a location, not a state of mind, not a metaphysical dimension of floating spirits, but an actual place populated by physical beings. ~ Max Lucado

255:The fact that Edison was a supporter of the mechanical breakthroughs in the physical world doesn’t mean he wasn’t equally entranced by the metaphysical. ~ Jodi Picoult

256:Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. ~ Aldous Huxley

257: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. ~ Joseph Joubert

258:I discovered suddenly that alienation, exploitation of man by man, under-nourishment, relegated to the background metaphysical evil which is a luxury. ~ Jean Paul Sartre

259:In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas. ~ Clive James

260:The great uncertainty I found in metaphysical reasonings disgusted me, and I quitted that kind of reading and study for others more satisfactory.” What ~ Walter Isaacson

261:What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go! ~ Brion Gysin

262:Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

263: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

264:For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word. ~ Jacques Maritain

265:In the manifested world, metaphysically speaking, evil is the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other. ~ Antonin Artaud

266:The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him. ~ Benjamin Constant

267:To deny the necessity or value of metaphysics is to assert a metaphysical principle, just as to say a religion must be without dogmas is to assert a dogma. ~ Fulton J Sheen

268:All facts are. In a world where everything is given and nothing is explained, the fecundity of a value or of a metaphysic is a notion devoid of meaning. ~ Albert Camus

269:...Fate forced me to become a two-man woman. But there was no effing way I could be a four-man woman. Even metaphysics couldn't keep that from being whorey. ~ Sierra Dean

270:Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

271: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. ~ William James

272:Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. ~ Philip K Dick

273:No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is. ~ Evelyn Underhill

274:Thus, metaphysically, Kalki will destroy everything, even death. He will destroy all structures so that none exist. In other words, he will herald Pralaya. ~ Devdutt Pattanaik

275:Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times. ~ Max Gladstone

276:Mathematics is the only true metaphysics. ~ William Thomson, as quoted by Silvanus Phillips Thompson, The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs (1910) Vol. 2, p. 1124.

277:"Psychological truths are not metaphysical insights; they are habitual modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving which experience has proved appropriate and useful." ~ Carl Jung

278:Those who think that metaphysics is just misunderstood grammar will react to my giving metaphysics some place or another in the system of knowledge. ~ Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra

279: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

280:A straightforward way of defining metaphysics is as the set of assumptions and practices present in the scientist’s mind before he or she begins to do science. ~ Neal Stephenson

281:How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems-are like that. ~ C S Lewis

282:the whole idea that people have a clue as to how the world works, is just a piece of laughable metaphysical colonialism perpetrated upon the wild country of time. ~ Lorrie Moore

283:Aristotle's metaphysics, roughly speaking, may be described as Plato diluted by common sense. He is difficult because Plato and common sense do not mix easily. ~ Bertrand Russell

284:In a religiously uniform culture, it is natural for people to take for granted the truth of the prevailing religion and its associated metaphysical propositions. ~ Richard Posner

285:[Schelling] viewed art as an organ of metaphysical cognition. The vehicle through which the mysteries of the highest transcendental truths are revealed to mankind. ~ Joseph Frank

286:The reality of a person is a deep and hidden thing, buried not only in the invisible recesses of man’s own metaphysical secrecy but in the secrecy of God Himself. ~ Thomas Merton

287:Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science. ~ Karl Popper

288:But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it. ~ Ren Girard

289:From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn. ~ Aldous Huxley

290:Knowledge has the form of a tree, and since metaphysics is the most fundamental one of the theoretical disciplines, it represents the roots of the tree. ~ Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra

291:The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels. ~ Tim Allen

292: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. ~ Immanuel Kant

293:Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit. ~ Haruki Murakami

294:He looked up with sharp incisive eyes. "What do we need a metaphysician for? Don't tell me some rejected author has put a curse on us." "Not today," Fletcher said. ~ Melissa Scott

295:In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me. ~ John Fowles

296:I think there is a metaphysical problem of the relation between mind and body. Thinking that there is no metaphysical dimension to the problem is an error. ~ Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra

297:There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. ~ Milan Kundera

298:You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong—to his own satisfaction. ~ Jack London

299:In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy. ~ Edward Abbey

300:Ancient metaphysics underwent many changes at the hands of medieval thinkers who brought it in line with the dominant religious and theological movements of their day. ~ Wilhelm Dilthey

301:But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science. ~ David Hume

302:No, free will is not an 'extra'; it is part and parcel of the very essence of consciousness. A conscious being without free will is simply a metaphysical absurdity. ~ Raymond M Smullyan

303:Animism is a monist metaphysical stance, based upon the idea that mind and matter are not distinct and separate substances but an integrated reality, rooted in nature. ~ Emma Restall Orr

304:Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

305:The old metaphysical prejudice that man 'always thinks' has not yet entirely disappeared. I am myself inclined to hold that man really thinks very little and very seldom. ~ Wilhelm Wundt

306:What's more unnerving than magnetism, ghosts, and unpurified water? Gadgetmongers who purport to protect us from metaphysical monsters that go bump in the New Age night. ~ Chris Hardwick

307:Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit. ~ Haruki Murakami

308:You cannot solve the problem by turning to communism, for communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. ~ Martin Luther King Jr

309:To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind. ~ Wallace Stevens

310:A healthy society is life-affirming. Homosexuality is the metaphysical negation of life. Incapable of reproduction (giving life), it can replenish its numbers only by seduction. ~ Don Feder

311: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

312:The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

313:Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit. Sitting ~ Haruki Murakami

314:Without having navigated waters shallow enough for us to see bottom, we’ll be easy prey to mystifiers who want to sell us radical metaphysical fantasies in the guise of science. ~ Lee Smolin

315:Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires. ~ Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals, p. 178.

316:The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration." ~ Gilbert K Chesterton

317:Misunderstanding of the dream. In the ages of crude primeval culture man believed that in dreams he got to know another real world; here is the origin of all metaphysics. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

318:When we begin to see each other through what the metaphysician calls, the third eye, we begin to know each other on a level that is beyond what our physical eyes can see. ~ Marianne Williamson

319:The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood. ~ Edith Wharton

320:By then running had entered the realm of the metaphysical. First there came the action of running, and accompanying it there was this entity known as me. I run; therefore I am. ~ Haruki Murakami

321:Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction. ~ Sri Aurobindo

322:The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual? ~ William James

323:His seven so-called Phallic Poems are among the best non-love verses since the brave days of Marvell and the Metaphysicals; they openly announce that fucking is its own justification. ~ Anonymous

324:Myth is necessary because reality is so much larger than rationality...man is fundamentally mythic...His real health depends upon his knowing and living his metaphysical totality. ~ Clyde S Kilby

325:Emmet Fox was one of the world's greatest metaphysical teachers. His works have contributed profoundly to the spiritual understanding of millions of people, including myself. ~ Marianne Williamson

326:I am no metaphysician, no philosopher, nay, no saint. But I am poor and I love the poor. I see what they call the poor of this country and how many there are who feel for them! ~ Swami Vivekananda

327:Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors. ~ George Lakoff

328:Religion is the only metaphysics that the multitude can understand and adopt. ~ Joseph Joubert, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 504

329:Small objects, like the Walkman first and then the iPod, create bubbles of space around us that enable us to have a metaphysical space that is much bigger than our physical space. ~ Paola Antonelli

330:Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut in the slightest bit. ~ Haruki Murakami

331:All my life, I have lived with the feeling that I have been kept from my true place. If the expression “metaphysical exile” had no meaning, my existence alone would afford it one. ~ Emil M Cioran

332:By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists. ~ Josiah Royce

333:From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption -- but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance ~ Dalai Lama

334:History is powerful stuff. One day your world is fine. The next day it's knocked for a metaphysical loop. Was Napoleon really at Waterloo? Would that change what I had for breakfast? ~ Henry Bromell

335:If our logic is to find the common world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among metaphysicians. ~ Bertrand Russell

336:The late philosopher Morris R. Cohen of CCNY was asked by a student in the metaphysics course, Professor Cohen, how do I know that I exist? The keen old prof replied, And who is asking? ~ Saul Bellow

337:There's a power that brings us to things, and there's a power that lets us move away from things, from people, places, experiences. And what you learn to do in metaphysics is accept. ~ Frederick Lenz

338:The seed of a metaphysical or religious defeat is in us all. For the honest questioner, however, who doesn't seek refuge in some faith or fantasy, there will never be an answer. ~ Peter Wessel Zapffe

339:You may have heard of the one called Chute, on Mars, who wrote a novel called Waste, a metaphysical detective novel about the nature of life and waste that featured Smeg, the detective. ~ Rich Horton

340:أشعر أنني منفصل تماما عن كل البلدان وعن كل المجموعات. أنا متشرد ميتافيزيقي I feel completely detached from any country, any group. I am a metaphysically displaced person ~ Emil M Cioran

341:Freedom of the will is a metaphysical question outside the scope of this book; but considered as a subjective datum of experience, 'free will' is the awareness of alternative choices. ~ Arthur Koestler

342:I will tell you that there have been no failures in my life. I don't want to sound like some metaphysical queen,but there have been no failures. There have been some tremendous lessons. ~ Oprah Winfrey

343:One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They'll do everything except rotate your tires. ~ Tom Robbins

344:strict mathematical form, with propositions, proofs, corollaries, lemmas, scholiums, and the like. However, the subject matter of metaphysics and of morals is not very satisfactorily ~ Mortimer J Adler

345:The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible. ~ Thomas Jefferson

346:From the scientific view, the theory of karma may be a metaphysical assumption -- but it is no more so than the assumption that all of life is material and originated out of pure chance ~ Dalai Lama XIV

347:Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

348:You need to put easy, nice, tranquil thoughts in your head before you go to bed. You know what I do? I read metaphysical books. The good stuff stays in your brain once you go under. ~ Cristina Saralegui

349:Aristo rejected the study of logic and metaphysics, arguing that the primary concern of philosophers should be the study of ethics, an attitude we can find echoed in The Meditations. ~ Donald J Robertson

350:It has been said that the question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' is so profound that it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple that it would occur only to a child. ~ Jim Holt

351:The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization. ~ Carl Schmitt

352:The purpose of all knowledge, metaphysical as well as scientific, is to achieve what Epicurus called ataraxia, freedom from irrational fears and anxieties of all sorts—in brief, peace of mind. ~ Epicurus

353:to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning—to consider a world that is self-evidently not the world we live in. That ~ Paul Kalanithi

354:poetry has been able to function quite directly as human interpretation of the raw, loose universe. It is a mixture, if you will, of journalism and metaphysics, or of science and religion. ~ Annie Dillard

355:The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. ~ Carl Sagan

356:The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us. ~ Alan Moore

357:Those who think of metaphysics as the most unconstrained or speculative of disciplines are misinformed; compared with cosmology, metaphysics is pedestrian and unimaginative. —Stephen Toulmin ~ Sean Carroll

358:Consequently he who wishes to attain to human perfection, must therefore first study Logic, next the various branches of Mathematics in their proper order, then Physics, and lastly Metaphysics. ~ Maimonides

359:For a metaphysical treat stop at the Big Sur Inn, which is also a haven for stray cats and dogs. Life along the South Coast is just a bed of roses, with a few thorns and nettles interspersed. ~ Henry Miller

360:The marriage of military metaphysics with eschatological ambition is a misbegotten one, contrary to the long-term interests of either the American people or the world beyond our borders. ~ Andrew J Bacevich

361:A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. ~ Karl Marx

362:Metaphysics is universal and is exclusively concerned with primary substance. ... And here we will have the science to study that which is, both in its essence and in the properties which it has. ~ Aristotle

363:The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood. ~ George Grosz

364:The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

365:you ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists. Then perhaps, as laughers, you may some day dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil— ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

366:Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

367:The pictures achieve something rarely articulated about the metaphysical state of swimming: The body, immersed, feels amplified, heavier and lighter at the same time. Weightless yet stronger. ~ Leanne Shapton

368:To think Being itself explicitly requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground, as in all metaphysics. ~ Martin Heidegger

369:In various ways, methods of approaching the mathematician's ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that was mistaken in metaphysics and theory of knowledge. ~ Bertrand Russell

370:We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism -- a Mongoloid metaphysic. ~ Edward Abbey

371:It's like doughnut holes. Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit. ~ Haruki Murakami

372:"Once metaphysical ideas have lost their capacity to recall and evoke the original experience they have not only become useless but prove to be actual impediments on the road to wider development." — ~ Carl Jung

373:In more metaphysical terms, it becomes a safe place in which one sleeps, dreams, and grows before emerging back into the world. Either way, it’s a place not merely of shelter, but of incubation. ~ Lesley Hazleton

374:The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical. ~ Thomas Merton

375:Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological. ~ Carl Jung

376:Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life. ~ George Santayana

377:You’re a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. ~ Jordan Peterson

378:Indeed, if one would explain how the abstrusest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really came about, it is always well (and wise) to ask first: at what morality does all this (does he) aim? ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

379:It is thus necessary to examine all things according to their essence, to infer from every species such true and well established propositions as may assist us in the solution of metaphysical problems. ~ Maimonides

380:I'm a humanist. I'm an observer. I have a very scientific mind. I believe metaphysics and science absolutely blended are more the truth for me. It doesn't work just believing in what somebody says. ~ Meredith Brooks

381:The American Indians, the ancient Indians would say, the metaphysical ones would say: "Power binds us together." Power, for a while, makes us what we are, perceivers, luminous perceivers of reality. ~ Frederick Lenz

382:The theologians, the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for me by the grind of stern reality! ~ Thomas Hardy

383:You’re a spirit, so to speak—a psyche—as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of Being. ~ Jordan B Peterson

384:Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction. ~ R Buckminster Fuller

385:Rauschenbusch rejected the usual religious emphasis on matters of piety, metaphysics, and the supernatural, interpreting Christianity instead as a spirit of brotherhood made manifest in social ethics. ~ Taylor Branch

386:There will be well-testable theories, hardly testable theories, and non-testable theories. Those which are non-testable are of no interest to empirical scientists. They may be described as metaphysical. ~ Karl Popper

387:He felt the evidence showed that some metaphysical force had directed evolution at three different points: the beginning of life, the beginning of consciousness, and the beginning of civilized culture. ~ Julian Jaynes

388:[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130) ~ Stephen Batchelor

389:Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction    ~ R Buckminster Fuller,

390:The bible is a source of great inspiration to me. It is a textbook of metaphysics. Within the bible are keys to personal growth, and lessons in personal actualization. The bible is a spiritual masterpiece. ~ John Fante

391:There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians.... Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods? ~ Jack London

392:A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.  ~ Karl Marx

393:It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. ~ Ayn Rand

394:Human freedom is realised in the adoption of humanity as an end in itself, for the one thing that no-one can be compelled to do by another is to adopt a particular end. - 'Metaphysical Principles of Virtue ~ Immanuel Kant

395:I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. ~ Thomas Merton

396:Music is amazing. There's some metaphysical comfort where it allows you to be isolated and alone while telling you that you are not alone... truly, the only cure for sadness is to share it with someone else. ~ Wayne Coyne

397:Philosophers sometimes also use 'reductionist' more strictly, to mean 'type-identities' between mental and physical categories, and to exclude 'non-reductive physicalisms' like metaphysical functionalism. ~ David Papineau

398:The disparagement of empirical evidence in favor of a metaphysical world of illusion has its origin in the conflicy between the emancipated individual of bourgeois society and his fate within that society. ~ Max Horkheimer

399:They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough. ~ Henry James

400:I haven't any troubles, I have some money like a gentleman of leisure, no boss, no wife, no children; I exist, that's all. And that particular trouble is so vague, so metaphysical, that I am ashamed of it. ~ Jean Paul Sartre

401:Like all religious thinkers, he carries with his scholar's equipment a pair of metaphysical wings, wherewith at any moment he may soar into the empyrean, out of reach of vulgar materialists, like you and me. ~ Upton Sinclair

402:The expository head has a message (though not its own message), a message whose efficacy derives, in part, from the almost metaphysical presence of the head, and the equally metaphysical absence of the body. ~ Eugene Thacker

403:When we can no longer divide, we are beyond Nature and approach the causal Cause, the abstract Cause. This is why the whole of metaphysics, all creation, is situated between the numbers One and Two. ~ R A Schwaller de Lubicz

404:I sometimes think that Buddhism is the toughest religion in the world. It not only eschews all talk of god but does not allow any instant remedies. Responsibility for one’s own acts is its only metaphysics. So ~ Kiran Nagarkar

405:The view that all aspects of reality can be reduced to matter and its various particles is, to my mind, as much a metaphysical position as the view that an organizing intelligence created and controls reality. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

406:Lyotard remarked that post-Modern artists often function as philosophers. They may deal with issues of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as many influential critics today approach art through philosophy. ~ Thomas McEvilley

407:The afterlife is all about overlapping planes. We all live in the same physical space, but on different metaphysical levels, and someone who’s passed before you might have reached a consciousness you haven’t yet. ~ Jodi Picoult

408:The idea of universal human rights may not seem as weird to some people as the idea of a personal God, but it is still a metaphysical idea that liberalism, at least as we know it, couldn't really survive without. ~ Ross Douthat

409:The moral truth here is obvious: anyone who feels that the interests of a blastocyst just might supersede the interests of a child with a spinal cord injury has had his moral sense blinded by religious metaphysics. ~ Sam Harris

410:Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars. ~ Giambattista Vico

411:Tantra is spiritual, not religious. It deals with the spirit. Religion is just an applied body of doctrines that's believed or not believed by one or more individuals. Spirituality is the science of metaphysics. ~ Frederick Lenz

412:The quality of the human that precludes identifying the individual with the class is 'metaphysical' and has no place in empiricist epistemology. The pigeon hole into which a man is shoved circumscribes his fate. ~ Max Horkheimer

413: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

414:Perhaps dandruff is the excreta of the mind — the quantity of this material being directly proportional to the amount of reading one indulges in. A book on German metaphysics would thus easily ruin a dress suit. ~ Thomas A Edison

415:The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. ~ Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

416:Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises. ~ Albert Memmi

417:"With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of the gods, or rather, the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. Everything the anima touches becomes numinous -- unconditional, dangerous, taboo magical." ~ Carl Jung

418:There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet. ~ Koren Zailckas

419:I am also at this point accustomed to reaffirm with emphasis my conviction that the sun is real, and also that it is hot--in fact as hot as Hell, and if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see. ~ Winston S Churchill

420:In fact the Kabbalah rests upon the exoteric Judeo-Christian tradition. It consists of metaphysics and philosophy, from which can be drawn a mystical way, which is applied and regulated through personal asceticism. ~ Robert Ambelain

421:Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products. This does not mean that evolution does not have metaphysical implications; I remain convinced that this is the case. ~ Simon Conway Morris

422:He proposed that she leave school at once and marry him, as surely she knew enough metaphysics already to keep house." "I take it she didn't take the suggestion well." "She threw a full cup of tea in his face. ~ Melissa Scott

423:preachers and theologians, who spend so much of their lives talking about God that, unless they are very careful, God starts to lose all reality for them and to become just a subject for metaphysical speculation. ~ Frederick Buechner

424:Was wäre, wenn wir die Annahme explizit machten und konkretisieren müssten, dass alle ernst zu nehmende Kunst und Literatur, und nicht nur die Musik, auf die Nietzsche diesen Begriff anwendet, ein opus metaphysicum ist? ~ Botho Strau

425:And then a throb hits you on the left ide of the head so hard that your head bobs to the right...There's no way that came from inside your head, you think. That's no metaphysical crisis. God just punched you in the face. ~ Andrew Levy

426:Our forebears envisioned a unified and a unifying faith, and yet somehow we have devolved in some corners of our movement into a metaphysical, theological wrestling match (often more pay-per-view style than Olympic rules). ~ Anonymous

427:Given that the `common sense' of many contemporary philosophers is shaped and supplemented by ideas from classical physics, the locus of most metaphysical discussions is an image of the world that sits unhappily between ~ James Ladyman

428:If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws. ~ Tom Robbins

429:The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting - and careerism. ~ Martha Rosler

430:To achieve contact with reality is not to transport oneself elsewhere, it is not transcendence but thorough immersion in one's surroundings. A reality which is neither purely physical nor metaphysical, but both at once. ~ Antoni Tapies

431:When I was young, and addicted to reading, I had heard about dancing on the points of metaphysical needles; but, by mixing in the world, I found the points of political needles finer and sharper than the metaphysical ones. ~ John Adams

432:And since I wanted you to feel as pleasurable the one thing that frightens us—namely, the metaphysical shudder—I had only to choose (from among the model plots) the most metaphysical and philosophical: the detective novel. ~ Umberto Eco

433:Animal knowledge is metaphysically constituted by apt belief, by belief whose correctness manifests the believer's epistemic competence, a relevant disposition to get it right on the matter at hand when one tries to do so. ~ Ernest Sosa

434:Belief must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs. ~ Friedrich Schleiermacher

435:Since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God image, self-realization—to put it in religious or metaphysical terms —amounts to God’s incarnation. ~ Carl Jung, CW 11

436: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. ~ William James

437:The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model. ~ Erwin Schrodinger

438:Healthy shame is the basic metaphysical boundary for human beings. It is the emotional energy that signals us that we are not God—that we will make mistakes, that we need help. Healthy shame gives us permission to be human. ~ John Bradshaw

439:Not all the subtilties of metaphysics can make me doubt a moment of the immortality of the soul, and of a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I desire it, I hope it, and will defend it to my last breath. ~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

440:Those who take knowledge to be a whole zoo of sub-disciplines will react to my giving metaphysics a privileged position in that zoo or to my thinking of knowledge as a tree, with more and less fundamental parts. ~ Gonzalo Rodriguez Pereyra

441:And when there are no more classes, when society is socially democratized and unified, then there will be revealed in all its metaphysical depths the never-ending tragedy of the conflict between personality and society. ~ Nikolai A Berdyaev

442:Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysique When he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics. ~ Voltaire

443:The world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world - the real world, if you like - is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structures is just as malleable. ~ Angela Carter

444:Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility. ~ Joan Robinson

445:The metaphysical experiences described in the Bible most frequently occur near water. In religious symbolism, water is a symbol of the etheric world that extends beyond the physical plane of life. ~ Manly P Hall, How to Understand Your Bible

446:We are by now well into the eighteenth century, when the Enlightenment identified the search for knowledge as the highest form of human activity. It was a time for scientists to wipe the metaphysical dust from their eyes. ~ Peter L Bernstein

447:I don’t know about ‘common sense opinion’ by the way. It seems to me that the office of common sense is to keep us from playing cards for high stakes with people we meet on trains, and not to endorse metaphysical opinions. ~ Peter van Inwagen

448:The ultimate question is why they go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question. ~ G K Chesterton

449:As Rorschach so poetically put it, “This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not god who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.”12 ~ William Irwin

450:It [9/11 event] transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion. ~ Edward Said

451:The purpose of art is to express timeless realities and see the present under the aspect of eternity. In this way our experience becomes desecularized and the metaphysical meaning of life is revealed. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

452:Agnostics are people who, like myself, confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters, about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatize with the utmost confidence. ~ Herbert Spencer

453:What both the state and the capitalist economy oppose is an understanding of what might be called "the true nature of things" (using the phrase without metaphysical pretensions), especially injustices and exploitative practices. ~ Richard A Falk

454:Every wizard needs to build rather than rent a metaphysics. And such a metaphysics needs to not only improve the success of your practical enchantments but also allow you to interrogate reality in an increasingly sophisticated way. ~ Gordon White

455:I enjoy the writings of all of these authors and they have been very inspirational for me. But I think that it is important as writers of metaphysical, New Age, occult fiction and nonfiction to not take ourselves too seriously. ~ Frederick Lenz

456:Metaphysics, in my understanding, is the unity of knowledge and the meaning and orientation this unity gives to life. If this unity is the unity of knowledge, how can it be all that subjective? It is a faith grounded in knowledge. ~ Fazlur Rahman

457:Your psychologists are not able to think in terms of a soul, and your religious leaders are not able, or refuse, to comprehend it psychologically even to its simplest degree. Metaphysics and psychology have not met, in other words. ~ Jane Roberts

458:In writing Snowboarding to Nirvana I have intentionally written an inspirational spiritual adventure story, which will hopefully provide people with metaphysical techniques, spiritual knowledge, hope and a brighter view of life. ~ Frederick Lenz

459:Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysique When he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics. ~ Voltaire

460:What finite beings say about transcendence is the semblance of transcendence; but as Kant well knew, it is a necessary semblance. Hence the incomparable metaphysical relevance of the rescue of semblance, the object of esthetics. ~ Theodor W Adorno

461:If our previous analyses are correct, they all point to the same conclusion, that metaphysical adventures are doomed to fail when their authors substitute the fundamental concepts of any particular science for those of metaphysics. ~ Etienne Gilson

462: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

463:Actually I'd always thought he sat in the library with a slim volume of metaphysical poetry until the commissioner called him on the bat phone and summoned him into action. Holy paranormal activity, Nightingale - to the Jag mobile. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

464:I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling. ~ T S Eliot

465:We are not called to proclaim philosophy and metaphysics, but the simple gospel. Man's fall, his need of a new birth, forgiveness through atonement, and salvation as the result of faith, these are our battle-ax and weapons of war. ~ Charles Spurgeon

466:Agnosticism is no excuse for indecision. If anything, it is a catalyst for action; for in shifting concern away from a future life and back to the present, it demands an ethics of empathy rather than a metaphysics of fear and hope. ~ Stephen Batchelor

467:A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality. ~ William Winwood Reade

468:I don't think Kant's theory looks bad to people except insofar as they have misunderstood it (for instance, as heartless and ironheaded, or as committed to an absurd metaphysical conception of freedom that violates Kant's own philosophy). ~ Allen W Wood

469:Western religion and theology represent a synthesis of two different traditions, the Hebraic tradition of religious revelation, which is represented by the Bible, and the Hellenic tradition of metaphysical or natural theology. ~ Christopher Henry Dawson

470:Although all things in their metaphysical origin proceed from the soul one and truly free from all particularisation, nevertheless by reason of non-illumination there is produced a subjective mind which becomes conscious of an external world. ~ Awaghosha

471: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. ~ Gilbert K Chesterton

472:The usual derivation of the word Metaphysics is not to be sustainedthe science is supposed to take its name from its superiority to physics. The truth is, that Aristotle's treatise on Morals is next in succession to his Book of Physics. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

473:How can you expect my character to be solidly real, to be anything other than obviously imaginary, when everything is contingent anyway? My Character has been deformed out of reality by his own nihilism, his own metaphysical nothingness. ~ Jean Paul Sartre

474:In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information. ~ James Gleick

475:The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social. ~ Margaret Mead

476:Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. ~ Giorgio de Chirico

477:Psychologically, the choice "to think or not" is the choice "to focus or not." Existentially, the choice "to focus or not" is the choice "to be conscious or not." Metaphysically, the choice "to be conscious or not" is the choice of life or death. ~ Ayn Rand

478:Art is magic... But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. ~ Hans Hofmann

479:Nothing in our politics is any longer driven or designed by individual humans who have a name and a face; we have sunk from theism into impersonal and depersonalizing deism, a scheme of rule by alien and implacable abstract metaphysical forces. ~ Kenny Smith

480:Hinduism is wholly free from the strange obsession of some faiths that the acceptance of a particular religious metaphysics is necessary for salvation, and non-acceptance thereof is a heinous sin meriting eternal punishment in hell. ~ Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

481:The question what presuppositions underlie the 'physics' or natural science of a certain people at a certain time is a purely historical question as what kind of clothes they wear. And this is the question that metaphysicians have to answer. ~ R G Collingwood

482:Maybe the siren was was a fire truck? Mercer couldn't see one anywhere, but like some bounding St. Bernard of the metaphysical, he couldn't quite let go of the belief that there must be an objective reality out there, beyond his own head. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

483:Prayer's important, not just as some kind of a metaphysical exercise, but I think it's a way to refresh one's own mind and motive. If you're praying, you're really looking beyond your own personal thoughts and the pressures that are around you. ~ Mike Huckabee

484:Spiritual intelligence is the capacity to conduct our life in such a way that it reflects deep philosophical and metaphysical understanding of reality and of ourselves discovered through personal experience during systematic spiritual pursuit. ~ Stanislav Grof

485:the burial practices in the Pharonic tradition were undertaken not merely to provide a receptacle for the physical body of the deceased, but also to make a place to retain the metaphysical knowledge which the person had mastered in his lifetime ~ Robert Lawlor

486:Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better thanthe metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men. ~ J L Austin

487:History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

488:I am not a "culture critic" because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities. That is why I have no interest in the academic world. ~ Marshall McLuhan

489:In post-Nietzschean spirit, the West appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy mélange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism, and philosophical skepticism. ~ Terry Eagleton

490:Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely that the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science. ~ Neal Stephenson

491:Metaphysical. Justus means just, upright. One definition of “just” is “conforming to the spiritual law . . . righteous before God.” Justus signifies that in man’s religious consciousness which truly worships God, which conforms to divine law. ~ Charles Fillmore

492:Metaphysical rebellion is a claim, motivated by the concept of a complete unity, against the suffering of life and death and a protest against the human condition both for its incompleteness, thanks to death, and its wastefulness, thanks to evil. ~ Albert Camus

493:The law is this: that each of our leading conceptions-each branch of our knowledge-passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious: the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. ~ Auguste Comte

494:What we need to be rescued from is not our physical nature, our metaphysical finitude, but our personal estrangement from God. Indeed, it is sin even to seek the identity with God that the Gnostics promoted. Creatures should never seek to become God. ~ Anonymous

495:Anyone who builds satellites we can’t shoot down needs to be taken seriously and, if they ever come back for their hardware, be approached with caution. That’s not religion, it’s common sense. Quellcrist Falconer Metaphysics for Revolutionaries ~ Richard K Morgan

496:Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen. ... But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity. ~ Bertrand Tavernier

497:Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

498:The more science I studied, the more I saw that physics becomes metaphysics and numbers become imaginary numbers. The farther you go into science, the mushier the ground gets. You start to say, 'Oh, there is an order and a spiritual aspect to science. ~ Dan Brown

499:The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History. ~ George Henry Lewes

500:Jo knew nothing about philosophy or metaphysics of any sort, but a curious excitement, half pleasurable, half painful, came over her, as she listened with a sense of being turned adrift into time and space, like a young balloon out on a holiday. ~ Louisa May Alcott

--- IN CHAPTERS (in Dictionaries, in Quotes, in Chapters)

0

   76 Integral Yoga
   29 Psychology
   29 Occultism
   22 Philosophy
   19 Poetry
   19 Christianity
   8 Science
   5 Integral Theory
   4 Fiction
   2 Yoga
   2 Mythology
   1 Theosophy
   1 Kabbalah
   1 Hinduism
   1 Education
   1 Alchemy


   81 Sri Aurobindo
   31 Carl Jung
   27 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   26 The Mother
   19 Satprem
   14 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
   10 Aleister Crowley
   8 Aldous Huxley
   5 Wang Wei
   5 Plotinus
   5 Plato
   5 A B Purani
   4 Saint John of the Cross
   4 Jorge Luis Borges
   4 H P Lovecraft
   3 Walt Whitman
   3 Jordan Peterson
   3 Friedrich Nietzsche
   2 Sri Ramana Maharshi
   2 Sri Ramakrishna
   2 Robert Browning
   2 Joseph Campbell
   2 Jorge Luis Borges


   20 The Life Divine
   10 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   10 Mysterium Coniunctionis
   10 Essays On The Gita
   10 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   9 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02
   8 The Perennial Philosophy
   8 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
   7 Aion
   7 A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah
   6 The Secret Doctrine
   6 The Practice of Psycho therapy
   6 Liber ABA
   6 Essays Divine And Human
   5 The Phenomenon of Man
   5 Let Me Explain
   5 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   5 Agenda Vol 07
   4 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   4 Letters On Yoga II
   4 Labyrinths
   4 Agenda Vol 02
   3 Twilight of the Idols
   3 The Future of Man
   3 Talks
   3 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
   3 Maps of Meaning
   3 Magick Without Tears
   3 Letters On Yoga I
   3 Isha Upanishad
   3 Agenda Vol 03
   2 Words Of Long Ago
   2 Whitman - Poems
   2 The Secret Of The Veda
   2 The Red Book Liber Novus
   2 The Problems of Philosophy
   2 The Human Cycle
   2 The Hero with a Thousand Faces
   2 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
   2 Sex Ecology Spirituality
   2 Selected Fictions
   2 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
   2 Plotinus - Complete Works Vol 02
   2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
   2 Letters On Yoga IV
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   2 Browning - Poems