Quotes about Metaphysics

To talk of rational beings apart from man is as if we attempted to talk of heavy beings apart from bodies.

The highest, i.e., the most general concepts, are the poorest; ultimately these are just empty shells, as, e.g., being, essence, thing, becoming, ect. - incidentally, whatever could philosophical systems produce when they are merely spun out of these same concepts and have as their matter only such empty shells of thought? They must be infinitely empty and poor, and therefore, turn out to be tedious and suffocating.

Not merely that the world exists, but still more that it is such a miserable and melancholy world, is the tormenting problem of metaphysics.

it is worthy of consideration, indeed marvelous, how besides his life in concreto, a person always leads a second in abstracto as well.

we have found that the whole essence of matter lies in action, a i.e. in causality: as a result, matter must also unify space and time, that is, matter must possess the properties of both time and space simultaneously

To postulate a trillion-trillion other universes, rather than one God, in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power.

What I am trying to do is to unmuddle the metaphysical.

Common sense says that if something possessed the ability to create itself from nothing, then that something wasn't nothing, it was something - a very intelligent creative power of some sort.