Philosophy Quotes - Page 35

Happiness has no book value, but life has no value if there is no happiness.

Debasish Mridha

Those things you can buy have no value but have a price. Those things you cannot buy have value and are priceless.

Debasish Mridha

The most important thing in life is not what you are but what you have to offer.

Abel Paulino

God endlessly fails to extend his blessings. That is because he no longer sits on the throne.

Lionel Suggs

No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.

Annie Besant

For a God that created everything, it is mystifying why he created so much competition.

Trevor Treharne

Billions of years ago God was creating universes and life; thousands of years ago he was creating angry floods, sin-saving human sacrifices and audible burning bushes. Today he occasionally appears on a piece of toast. To state that God has become reclusive over the years would be an overwhelming understatement.

Trevor Treharne

The most dangerous aspect of religion is its tendency to glorify the absurd and justify the abhorrent.

Stifyn Emrys

Obsoletes and absolutes are the stock in trade of religions that place their faith in an 'unchanging' god while faced with the reality of an ever-changing world.

Stifyn Emrys

Oh, you knew that your deed would be preserved in books, would reach tghe depths of the ages and the utmost limits of the earth, and you hoped that, following you, man, too, would remain with God, having no need of miracles. But you did not know that as soon as man rejects miracles, he will at once reject God as well, for man seeks not so much God as miracles. And since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create new miracles for himself... Oh, there will be centuries of free reason, of their science and anthropophagy... Freedom, free reason, and science willl lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements and we get organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean S. Kamali

For wicked people to do evil requires money, and good people superstition. Combining these elements gives us organized religion, but to achieve the worst of all evil conflate politics to the compound and the tragedies are endless.

Sean Kamali

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Alexander Pope

It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting.

Alain de Boton

If you look up 'atheism' in the dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek 'a' means 'without' or 'not' and 'theos' means 'god.' From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God.

Michael Martin

Atheism ... goes back to the Ancient Greek (a — a negative prefix, theos — god), evidencing the antiquity of the outlook of those who saw no presence of God (or gods) in their everyday lives, or who even denied the very existence of God (or gods). There are different types of atheism, but atheism in one form or another has existed in every civilization.[T]he concept "atheist" partially coincides with such notions as "skeptic," "agnostic," and "rationalist" and it borders with such notions as "anticlerical," "God fighter" (theomachist), and "God abuser" (blasphemer).It is wrong to identify an atheist as one who denies God, though this is what opponents of atheism usually claim. If such people exist, it would probably be more correct to call them the "verbal" murderers of God, for the prefix a- means denying as elimination. ... I would like to stress that the prefix a- does not necessarily mean rejection. It can mean "absence of." For example, "apathy" means "absence of passion." Thus, the concept "atheist" does not necessarily mean nihilism.

Valerii A. Kuvakin

[Jürgen Habermas' obituary to friend and philosopher, Richard Rorty]One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.

Jürgen Habermas

The traditional arguments for the existence of God have been fairly thoroughly criticised by philosophers. But the theologian can, if he wishes, accept this criticism. He can admit that no rational proof of God's existence is possible. And he can still retain all that is essential to his position, by holding that God's existence is known in some other, non-rational way. I think, however, that a more telling criticism can be made by way of the traditional problem of evil. Here it can be shown, not that religious beliefs lack rational support, but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another, so that the theologian can maintain his position as a whole only by a much more extreme rejection of reason than in the former case. He must now be prepared to believe, not merely what cannot be proved, but what can be disproved from other beliefs that he also holds.

John Leslie Mackie

Injustice upon earth renders the justice of of heaven impossible.

Robert G. Ingersoll

In the Christian religion, though perhaps not in any other, we frequently find a conception of god that is selfcontradictory and therefore corresponds to nothing. That is the conception formed by the following three propositions taken together:1. God is all-powerful.2. God is all-benevolent.3. There is much misery in the world.A god who was all-powerful but left much misery in the world would not be all-benevolent. An all-benevolent god in a world containing much misery would not be an all-powerful god. A world containing a god who was both all-powerful and all-benevolent would contain no misery.Here, then, we have a mathematical proof bearing on a common religious doctrine. Anyone who is confident that he frequently comes across misery in the world may conclude with equal confidence that there is no such thing as an all-powerful and all-benevolent god. And this mathematically disposes of official Christianity, as has long been known.

Richard Robinson

When a mere girl, my mother offered me a dollar if I would read the Bible through; . . . . despairing of reconciling many of its absurd statements with even my childish philosophy, . . . I became a sceptic, doubter, and unbeliever, long ere the 'Good Book' was ended.

Elmina Drake Slenker

For the first time (but how long will it take us to acknowledge this?) in the history of ideas, a philosopher had dedicated a whole book to the question of atheism. He professed it, demonstrated it, arguing and quoting, sharing his reading and his reflections, and seeking confirmation from his own observations of the everyday world. His title sets it out clearly: Memoir of the Thoughts and Feelings of Jean Meslier; and so does his subtitle: Clear and Evident Demonstrations of the Vanity and Falsity of All the Religions of the World. The book appeared in 1729, after his death. Meslier had spent the greater part of his life working on it. The history of true atheism had begun.

Michel Onfray

One of the recent arguments from design, that based on the so-called fine-tuning life of some fundamental physical constants, founders on the following objections: an extremely small prior probability merited by the God of theism in light – if that is the right word – of the Problem of Evil; the fact that it is not unreasonable to place a substantial probability on the hypothesis that a future theory will fix those values; and the sheer incoherence of computations of the ‘chances’ of fine-tuning were there no fine-tuner.

Colin Howson

Dr. Peter Boghossian’s A Manual for Creating Atheists is a precise, passionate, compassionate and brilliantly reasoned work that will illuminate any and all minds capable of openness and curiosity. This is not a bedtime story to help you fall asleep, but a wakeup call that has the best chance of bringing your rational mind back to life.(Review of Dr. Peter Boghossian's book, 'A Manual for Creating Atheists')

Stefan Molyneux

Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally. If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense? If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all morality, would have no desire to create anything. If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe? If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else. If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not take creation wholly blissful free from misfortune? If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all, And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place? Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own n

Jinasena

Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were 'agnostic' about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things.As yet, there is no direct experimental evidence of a deity, and in order for the postulation of a deity to play an explanatory role there would have to be a lot of detail about how it would act. If, as you have suggested, we are not “good judges of how the deity would behave,” then such an unknown and unpredictable deity cannot provide good explanatory grounds for any phenomenon. The problem with the 'minimal view' is that in trying to be as vague as possible about the nature and motivation of the deity, the hypothesis loses any explanatory force, and so cannot be admitted on scientific grounds. Of course, as the example of quarks and neutrinos shows, scientific accounts change in response to new data and new theory. The default position can be overcome.

Tim Maudlin

Spiritual": religion without any rules. All the comfort of fictitious friends with none of their demands.

Stefan Molyneux

If a supernatural being is to be exempt from natural law, it cannot possess specific, determinate characteristics. These attributes would impose limits and these limits would restrict the capacities of this supernatural being. In this case, a supernatural being would be subject to the causal relationships that mark natural existence, which would disqualify it as a god. Therefore, we must somehow conceive of a being without a specific nature, a being that is indeterminate—a being, in other words, that is nothing in particular. But these characteristics (or, more precisely, lack of characteristics) are incompatible with the notion of existence itself.

George H. Smith

If a supernatural being is to be exempt from natural law, it cannot possess specific, determinatecharacteristics. These attributes would impose limits and these limits would restrict the capacitiesof this supernatural being. In this case, a supernatural being would be subject to the causalrelationships that mark natural existence, which would disqualify it as a god. Therefore, we mustsomehow conceive of a being without a specific nature, a being that is indeterminate—a being, inother words, that is nothing in particular. But these characteristics (or, more precisely, lack ofcharacteristics) are incompatible with the notion of existence itself.

George H. Smith

To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.

George H. Smith

[A]ny being with the supposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.

George H. Smith

[A]ny being with thesupposed capacity to create the logically impossible must himself be logically impossible.

George H. Smith

I mean, whatWhat if no one's watchingWhat if when we're deadWe are just deadI mean, whatWhat if it's just us down hereWhat if God is just an ideaSomeone put in your head

Ani DiFranco

The conventional term is "mystical experience," meaning something that by its very nature lies beyond the reach of language, except for some vague verbal hand-wavings about "mystery" and "transcendence." As far as I was concerned - as a rationalist, an atheist, a scientist by training - this was the realm of gods and fairies and of no use to the great human project of trying to retain a foothold on the planet for future generations.

Barbara Ehrenreich

What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose on earth? These are some of the great, false questions of religion. We need not answer them, for they are badly posed, but we can live our answers all the same. At a minimum, we can create the conditions for human flourishing in this life--the only life of which any of us can be certain. That means we should not terrify our children with thoughts of hell or poison them with hatred for infidels. We should not teach our sons to consider women their future property or convince our daughters that they are property even now. And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

Sam Harris

Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]

Ludwig Feuerbach

[This philosophy] does not … regard the pen as the only fit organ for the revelation of truth, but the eye and ear, the hand and foot

Ludwig Feuerbach

Atheism is the philosophical equivalent of a fish denying the existence of land because he lacks the means to experience it.

J.Adam Snyder

I have never known anyone to win a battle waged against his emotions. When a sentiment hoists his glimmering blade into the air, the battle is lost before it has begun.

Kelseyleigh Reber

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.

Robert C. Solomon

Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.

Neel Burton

Our emotional response is driven by the proximity of events.

Piyush Shrivastav

For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.

Lin Yutang

Humankind spends so much time admiring and ritualizing the inventions of humankind! And yet humankind is such a tiny part of all there is. -- Nigel S. Hey, Wonderment(Matador, 2012)

Nigel Hey

For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

Hermann Hesse

...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical.

Dianna Hardy

Our thoughts are private to protect others not ourselves. People don't have the ability to handle what you really think about them

Morena Baloyi

Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature.

Nocturnus Libertus

Creatures of a day. What is someone? What is no one? Man is the dream of a shadow.

Pindar

There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one’s very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself.

Jean Bethke Elshtain

It is fundamental to both Taoist and Confucian thought that the natural man is to be trusted, and from their standpoint it appears that the Western mistrust of human nature-whether theological or technological-is a kind of schizophrenia. It would be impossible, in their view, to believe oneself innately evil without discrediting the very belief, since all the notions of a perverted mind would be perverted notions.

Alan W. Watts

Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.

Alan Moore

402Emotional position is part of it, but as an individual you are not your emotions, neither are you your intellect. These are things that you have . They're not things that you are . Therefore you have to start to become aware of the different requirements that human beings have, the different areas that they like to be satisfied in. Which means becoming aware of yourself. I mean, as a writer you're gonna have to understand pretty much the whole universe. But the best place to start is by understanding the inner universe. The entire universe – for one thing – only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality. So. To understand the universe there's worse advice than that which was carved above the shrine of the Delphi oracle. Where it just said: “Know thyself”. Understand yourself. Know thyself is a magical goal, but like I say to me there is very little difference between magic and creative art in any sense – the laws of one apply perfectly well to the other.

Alan Moore

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

George Lakoff

Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted, men who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge, who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit, we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.

David Hume

All motivation derives from the primary fact of mortality. Take mortality away and motivation loses its...motivation.

Glen Duncan

I am strangely tired, not from having talked so much but at the mere thought of what I still have to say

Albert Camus

Pessimism is a funny thing, isn't it? Madison thought as she looked at Judith's furrowed face. I like a bit of pessimism as much as the next man, but when I'm bombarded with it I suddenly became an eternal optimist.

Melissa Kite

One thing that unites us all, one thing is universal among the human species; the anatomy. Big, small, fat, thin, colour or creed are irrelevant. Under the skin, under the flesh, we are one and the same. We desire the same things; love, money, power. All the things we can not have, not without cost.

Rob Shepherd

Man is a plant, and its gardener. But it is only his soil that lets him rise, and it is only gardening himself, that may allow him to bear fruit.

Lars Frodesen

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Philosophy Quotes - Page 35

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