Metaphysics

(165 votes)   The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

Samuel Johnson
1709-1784, British Author

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(152 votes)   A metaphysician is one who, when you remark that twice two makes four, demands to know what you mean by twice, what by two, what by makes, and what by four. For asking such questions metaphysicians are supported in oriental luxury in the universities, and respected as educated and intelligent men.

H. L. Mencken
1880-1956, American Editor, Author, Critic, Humorist

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(128 votes)   I was thrown out of N.Y.U. my freshman year for cheating on my metaphysics final. You know, I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.

Woody Allen
1935-, American Director, Screenwriter, Actor, Comedian

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(127 votes)   A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain-threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians.

William James
1842-1910, American Psychologist, Professor, Author

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(114 votes)   Four thousand volumes of metaphysics will not teach us what the soul is.

Voltaire
1694-1778, French Historian, Writer

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(112 votes)   Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.

William James
1842-1910, American Psychologist, Professor, Author

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(108 votes)   Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

Robert M. Pirsig
American Author

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(106 votes)   Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.

Giambattista Vico
1688-1744, Italian Philosopher, Historian

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