David Hume Quotes

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

Alchemy is a kind of philosophy: a kind of thinking that leads to a way of understanding.

If I want to read something that's really giving me something serious and fundamental to think about, about the human condition, if you like, or what we're all doing here, or what's going on, then I'd rather read something by a scientist in the life sciences, like Richard Dawkins, for instance.

The business of philosophy is to circumnavigate human nature.

If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Breathless and unharmed, we emerge from the mazes of metaphysics and psychology where man and the soul are playing hide-and-seek.

Hopefully, great science fiction films help you think about issues that relate to yourself, whether it's: What's my purpose? Why am I here? What is it that makes me who I am? Those are the kind of questions my favorite science fiction films ask.

Not knowing life, how can we know death? Why talk of spirits when you do not understand men?

We must re-center philosophy within our frame of reference which I think is the way to deal with it.

There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?

Kant ... discovered "the scandal of reason," that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.

Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?

No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

[Star Wars is] designed primarily to make young people think about the mystery. Not to say, 'Here's the answer.' It's to say, 'Think about this for a second. Is there a God? What does God look like? What does God sound like? What does God feel like? How do we relate to God?'

Born and nurtured when the human being first asked questions about the reason for things and their purpose, philosophy shows in different modes and forms that the desire for truth is part of human nature itself.

Philosophy treats of physics where a more careful knowledge is required because the problems which come under this head are numerous... So the reader of Ctesibius or Archimedes and the other writers of treatises of the same class will not be able to appreciate them unless he has been trained in these subjects by the philosophers.

The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy.

The wise skeptic does not teach doubt but how] to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!

For through wondering human beings now and in the beginning have been led to philosophizing.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.

Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.