Quotes about Philosophy

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

We are required to "bet our life" that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself.

Often I have asked at USC and other places in public, "Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done? If it has not been done, isn't it a little on the questionable side to announce we are a secular university?

The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith. They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God, but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.

First, we must learn from him the reason why we live and why we do the things we do.

The results are only infrequently a matter of murder, but world as well as individual events ride upon the waters of an ideational sea. The killing fields of Cambodia come from philosophical discussions in Paris.

But what is true of Christianity in its inception and history is true of other religions as well. They all present themselves as providing knowledge of what is real and what is right. To think otherwise is to falsify the very nature of religious consciousness and religious life

They then easily moved on to the faith-destroying, even blasphemous idea that everything that happens in this world is caused by God.

I don't think that the total creation took place in six days as we now measure time. If we can confirm, say, the Big Bang theory, that doesn't at all cause me to question my faith that God created the Big Bang.

Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

It is our actions and the soul's active exercise of its functions that we posit (as being Happiness).