Gregory Benford Quotes

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

From my undergraduate days, I've always been interested in the major philosophical questions that don't seem to have an answer that everyone agrees on.

It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.

I'm taking a philosophy class and regretting it with everything in me. I'm taking one college class per semester. Philosophy is studying what you already know and dismantling it. I thought it would be right up my alley. I can't tell you how much it's not me.

I took all the philosophy courses I could.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

I don't think there's an interesting boundary between philosophy and science. Science is totally beholden to philosophy. There are philosophical assumptions in science and there's no way to get around that.

Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value.

The quest of the absolute leads into the four-dimensional world.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

Young children are naturally so philosophical. They ask: 'What is real? What is truth?' They have to learn it; they don't automatically know it. To them, it's a game. You can study this for years in college, and yet you probably asked it when you were four or five years old.

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness.

Initially, I studied philosophy, because it claimed to give you answers to the meaning of existence, but it didn't: It was basically a semantics game.

The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilised men.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

I was interested in philosophy before I knew I was. That's to say, when I was at school, I used to argue with my friends about issues that turned out to be philosophical ones of some kind.

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

Whence? wither? why? how? - these questions cover all philosophy.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.