in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
Send
Philosophy
Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice.
Send
Then is what you see through this window onto the world so lovely that you have no desire whatsoever to look out through any other window, and that you even make an attempt to prevent others from doing so?
Send
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.
Send
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
Our present work sets forth mathematical principles of philosophy. For the basic problem of philosophy seems to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces. It is to these ends that the general propositions in books 1 and 2 are directed, while in book 3 our explanation of the system of the world illustrates these propositions.
Send
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of today's scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.
Send
Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.
Send
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
The past is no more and the future is not yet: both are unnecessarily moving in directions which don't exist. One used to exist, but no longer exists, and one has not even started to exist. The only right person is one who lives moment to moment, whose arrow is directed to the moment, who is always here and now; wherever he is, his whole consciousness, his whole being, is involved in the reality of here and in the reality of now. That's the only right direction. Only such a man can enter into the golden gate. The present is the golden gate. Here-now is the golden gate. And you can be in the present only if you are not ambitious, no accomplishment, no desire to achieve power, money, prestige, even enlightenment, because all ambition leads you into the future. Only a non-ambitious man can remain in the present. A man who wants to be in the present has not to think, has just to see and enter the gate. Experience will come, but experience has not to be premeditated.
Send
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my researches in the field of speculative philosophy.
Send
in Quotes & Aphorisms (Philosophy)
The being of the phenomenon although coextensive with the phenomenon, can not be subject to the phenomenal condition-which is to exist only in so far as it reveals itself-and that consequently it surpasses the knowledge which we have of it and provides the basis for such knowledge.
Send