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Philosophy Quotes
"I must ask myself, “Billy Graham, are you prepared to meet the Master at any moment?” Yes, I am-but not because I have preached or tried to help people, but solely because I am trusting Christ as my Lord and Savior. Stop right now and ask yourself that question."
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"Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look."
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"Zen teaches that once we can open up to the inevitability of our demise, we can begin to transform that situation and lighten up about it."
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"Random violence is incredibly infectious."
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"Forgiveness is one of the most beautiful words in the human vocabulary. How much pain and unhappy consequences could be avoided if we all learned the meaning of this word!"
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"The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute to that."
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"It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong."
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"Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent."
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"I've been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind."
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"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without anyother reason but because they are not already common."
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"The Bible teaches that our homes should be hospitable and that those who come in and out of our homes should sense the presence of Christ."
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"I am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greek and Roman leave to us."
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"The misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if every passion did not possess its quantum of reason."
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"It is my conviction that there is no way to peace - peace is the way."
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"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes."
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"Because [the Holy Spirit] is a spirit, [He] isn't limited by time or space. He can be everywhere at once. He is in the midst of the largest galaxy-and the smallest atom."
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"No matter how many obstacles that are thrown in our path, there are ways to except them and to live through them."
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"If there is a sin against life it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."
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"What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other. You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys."
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"God, who in the beginning was the creator, appears in the end as revenger and rewarder. Deference to such a God admittedly can produce virtuous actions; however, because fear of punishment or hope for reward are their motive, these actions will not be purely moral; on the contrary, the inner essence of such virtue will amount to prudent and carefully calculating egoism."
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"Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute."
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"Imagine others complexly."
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"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"
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"It is not history which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends."
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"Peter preached about [the blood]. Paul wrote about it, and the redeemed in heaven sing about it. In a sense, the New Testament is the Book of the Blood."
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"Imitate Jesus and Socrates."
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"Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires...Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform."
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"It is wise for us to forget our troubles, there are always new ones to replace them."
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"The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self."
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"If you describe yourself as "Atheist," some people will say, "Don't you mean 'Agnostic'?" I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god - in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It's easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it's an opinion I hold seriously. It's funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much."
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"The feet of the Christian need to tread the narrow path that the Savior trod, keeping in step with Him."
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"In all three cases, and for most human beings, the problem of suffering poses no difficult problem at all: one has a world picture in which suffering has its place, a world picture that takes suffering into account."
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"The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves."
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"I never went to a John Wayne movie to find a philosophy to live by or to absorb a profound message. I went for the simple pleasure of spending a couple of hours seeing the bad guys lose."
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"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"
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"Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars."
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"In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them."
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"If after all men cannot always make history have a meaning they can always act so that their own lives have one."
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"To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher."
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"Now she knew living was just a brief hiatus, a blip really, in the infinite line of nothingness that composed that shadowy realm of the unknown. It could stop at any time."
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"I fall asleep with the sound of rain, I wake up with the songs of the wind."
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"Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before."
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"Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth."
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"What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair. Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life."
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"The closer you are to God, the farther you are from the devil."
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"Find a victory in every defeat to remain hopeful and find a defeat in every victory to remain humble."
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"How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?"
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