Quotes about Philosophy

The success of A Brief History indicates that there is widespread interest in the big questions like: Where did we come from? And why is the universe the way it is?

After all, it is hard to think of a more important, or fundamental, mystery than what, or who, created and controls the universe.

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why this particular set of laws and not some other?

This result was very convenient for Marxist—Leninist dialectical materialism

people don't seem too worried about a possible end twenty billion years in the future. You can do quite a lot of eating, drinking and being merry before that.

Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention.

Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.

Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves, is all we will ever have — and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.

Why should not He had made all things, still having something immediately to do with the things that He has made? Where lies the great difficulty, if we own the being of a God, that He created all things out of nothing, I'll be allowing something immediate influence of God on creation still?

His aim, in all his investigations, was the discovery and the defence of truth.

This is the most excellent and divine wisdom that any creature is capable of. 'Tis more excellent than any human learning; 'tis far more excellent than all the knowledge of the greatest philosophers or statesmen. Yea, the least glimpse of the glory of God in the face of Christ doth more exalt and ennoble the soul than all the knowledge of those that have the greatest speculative understanding in divinity without grace.

at New Haven with the valedictory. In his Sophomore year he made the acquaintance of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding—a work which left a permanent impress on his thinking. He read it, he says, with a far higher pleasure "than the most greedy miser finds when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold from some newly-discovered treasure.