Top 40 Metaphysical Quotes

What’s so interesting to me about history is – what’s interesting to anyone – is how humans are the same. Their belief systems were so different. They had different metaphysical truths than we do. And yet we’re the same.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting. It was a metaphysical attitude.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and thought the whole world was like that. My parents were secular, but I went to a very Orthodox Jewish school, and I really got into it. I found it all fascinating, and I was just kind of really attracted to the metaphysical questions.

Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages.

In a deep metaphysical sense, all that is conditioned is illusory. All phenomena are literally ‘appearances,’ the outer masks in which the One Reality shows itself forth in our changing universe. The more ‘material’ and solid the appearance, the further is it from reality, and therefore the more illusory it is.

The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.

You need to put easy, nice, tranquil thoughts in your head before you go to bed. You know what I do? I read metaphysical books. The good stuff stays in your brain once you go under.

If you say morality is just what you like, you lose the metaphysical level of what in the history of philosophy is called ‘categorical imperative.’

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

I’ve got deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys. Journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It’s what I’ve been elected by God to do.

I think that when a film does its job, it poses questions rather than gives answers. It should act as a frustrating counselor who, at your bidding for advice, says, ‘What do you think?’ I think that’s some of what the culture critic Greg Tate meant by art leaving a ‘metaphysical stain.’

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of nominal nonbelievers turn out to have all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

All good children’s books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.

One of my books is a hallucinogen, an aphrodisiac, a mood elevator, an intellectual garage door opener, and a metaphysical trash compactor. They’ll do everything except rotate your tires.

It is thus necessary to examine all things according to their essence, to infer from every species such true and well established propositions as may assist us in the solution of metaphysical problems.

The Internet is changing American fiction – and I don’t mean in some kind of metaphysical way.

The verbal interpretation, on the other hand, i.e. the metaphysics of quantum physics, is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

My mother was religious; she was knowledgeable about mythology and scriptures; she could tell the metaphysical nuances and make the story come to life with their deeper significance. The current generation is missing out on this.

Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.

For me, ‘Moby-Dick’ is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual – the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Art’s development should be dialectical and not metaphysical.

Evolution is true, it happens, it is the way the world is, and we too are one of its products. This does not mean that evolution does not have metaphysical implications; I remain convinced that this is the case.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

I always lived by railroads, and I would find places to just look at the horizon, and I always expected there was something somewhere else. And sometimes I think that’s more a metaphysical somewhere else rather than just to get out of the town.

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

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

Love is metaphysical gravity.

Prayer’s important, not just as some kind of a metaphysical exercise, but I think it’s a way to refresh one’s own mind and motive. If you’re praying, you’re really looking beyond your own personal thoughts and the pressures that are around you.

I stress the uniqueness of the Australian landscape and its metaphysical and mythic content.

Metaphysical thinking will always no doubt be a strong element in her mentality, and it is to be hoped that she will never lose her great, her sovereign powers in that direction.

My texts are written like palimpsests. They are written over and over again, until I feel that a kind of metaphysical meaning can be read through the writing.

Art is magic… But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic.

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She’s my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.

Art’s a very metaphysical activity. It’s something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That’s why people are involved with art.

Given the eclectic and constantly shifting nature of my metaphysical inclinations, I will probably never feel certain exactly what an angel is.

I think we’re in the time when the metaphysical world is so interesting.