P. D. James Quotes

There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen and the unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp or explain, and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing.

I frequently find after a rehearsal of a performance that I have more breath, and can walk better and climb stairs better than I could before. It's as if I've expanded my lungs doing it. Basically speaking, conducting is quite a healthy profession.

I have inhaled, exhaled everything.

I'm a big foodie! I eat, like, three times a day... but most of all, I'm a breathie. Breathing air? That's the best thing in the world! I couldn't go two minutes without breathing.

In the human lung, there are millions of air foils, just like aeroplane wings, which facilitate normal breathing.

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

The specious figments of genius, and the erratic flights of philosophy, may excite our wonder, but they cannot stand the ordeal of scrutiny, or the Lydian touch of experiment.

[It has become] … a principal ground whereon was reared up that Speculating phalanx.

I find it really cheap when people talk about an issue just for the sake of talking and are not making any difference to the actual situation.

We can have fun speculating about why things are the way they are but don't look to science to provide any answers.

Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

Rejecting all organs of informationbut my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind.

Metaphysical assertions, however, are statements of the psyche, and are therefore psychological. Whenever the Westerner hears the word “psychological,” it always sounds to him like “only psychological.

Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.

I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

The problems of philosophy and the systems designed to solve them are formulated in terms which tend to refer, not to the realm of actuality, but to the realms of possibility and necessity: to what might be and what must be, rather than to what is.

What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer reflective types in the world?

In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.

Souls! When have you seen your own soul - that you're so certain you have one?

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.