Quotes about Metaphysics

G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?"[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God

How comes the world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? ... from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.

Hence, according to the Philosopher (Metaph. x), "things which are diverse are absolutely distinct, but things which are different differ by something.

Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.

Heidegger says that "the fundamental question of metaphysics" is "why is there anything at all rather than nothing?" The fundamental question is not, as Plato thought, "what" a thing is (every Platonic dialogue is about that, about an essence, a definition, a concept, such as justice or piety or learning) but why it exists, why anything exists. Plato never asked that ultimate question. And the answer is God.

As Julie Andrews once sang, "Nothing came from nothing. Nothing ever could.

Spirit is the real and eternal matter is the unreal and the temporal.

To see this we must learn that some have said that relation is not a reality, but only an idea. But this is plainly seen to be false from the very fact that things themselves have a mutual natural order and habitude.

The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?

For nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.

If there ever was a time when absolutely nothing existed, all there could possibly be now is nothing.

The quantity comes from the efficient cause but the quality comes from the formal cause.