Top 361 Metaphysical Quotes & Sayings

The political is replacing the metaphysical as the characteristic mode of grasping reality.

I think we're in the time when the metaphysical world is so interesting.

The metaphysical doctrine of determinism simply asserts that all events in this world are fixed, or unalterable, or predetermined. It does not assert that they are known to anybody, or predictable by scientific means. But it asserts that the future is as little changeable as is the past. Everybody knows what we mean when we say that the past cannot be changed. It is in precisely the same sense that the future cannot be changed, according to metaphysical determinism.

Here's an example: someone says, "Master, please hand me the knife," and he hands them the knife, blade first. "Please give me the other end," he says. And the master replies, "What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical. When the question is, "Master, what is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?" Then he replies, "There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool." That is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same.

Attaching a Creator to the boundary is metaphysical skullduggery.

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

Art is the highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of this life.

If 'god' is a metaphysical term, then it cannot be even probable that a god exists. For to say that 'God exists' is to make a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false. And by the same criterion, no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god can possess any literal significance.

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

Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations.

I stress the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and its metaphysical and mythic content.

Metaphysical world.- It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off.

Kant certainly was sympathetic with the metaphysical tradition of rational theology that he criticized.

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

I never was able to believe in the existence of next year except as in a metaphysical notion.

What I am trying to do is to unmuddle the metaphysical.

To live strikes me as a metaphysical mistake of matter, a dereliction of inaction.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

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

... human free will implies God's prior decision not to tamper with the metaphysical base of that free will. It also implies man's ability to reject the persuasion God uses to influence that free will while leaving its metaphysical base intact! Persuasion, not compulsion, is what even He must rely upon! And persuasion, by its very definition, must be resistible!

That which is communicated, i.e., understood, is metaphysical. The means of communication is physical.

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

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.

The metaphysical apologia at least betrayed the injustice of the established order through the incongruence of concept and reality. The impartiality of scientific language deprived what was powerless of the strength to make itself heard and merely provided the existing order with a neutral sign for itself. Such neutrality is more metaphysical than metaphysics.

The indispensability argument seeks to assimilate the epistemology of metaphysical statements to the epistemology of statements that are obviously empirical. I think it fails to achieve this goal. The argument does not refute the Carnapian thesis that scientific theories and metaphysical claims differ epistemologically - observations can provide evidence for the former, but not for the latter.

The problem of a painting is physical and metaphysical, the same as I think life is physical and metaphysical.

Colours exist for me as entities in themselves, as metaphysical beings.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

Love is a metaphysical gravity.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

The bed is a metaphysical piece of furniture.

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.

Mathematics has not a foot to stand upon which is not purely metaphysical.

As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.

Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

Ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth.

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

Metaphysical speculation is about as pointless as a discussion on the meaning of one's lungs. They're for breathing.

All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.

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

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

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.

If we want to make sense of the possibility of successful inductive inference, and if we want to explain the possibility of laws of nature, we will need to appeal to something like natural kinds. This is, to be sure, a metaphysical commitment, but it is a metaphysical commitment that is implicit in science, as I see it.

Personalism's insistence that only personality-finite and infinite-is ultimately real strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

The irrational haunts the metaphysical.

I think in metaphysical terms, I would call that increasing the speed of the vibration of life.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

The ultimate metaphysical ground is the creative advance into novelty.

The Internet is changing American fiction - and I don't mean in some kind of metaphysical way.

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.

"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical entities if Platonism is correct.

Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.

Art's development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.