92 Metaphysics Quotes To Inspire

Metaphysics has long captivated thinkers and seekers with its profound questioning of existence, reality, and the nature of being. It's a field where philosophy meets the abstract, challenging our conventional notions and inspiring deep contemplation. In this article, we've curated a collection of the top 92 metaphysics quotes from renowned philosophers, scientists, and visionaries. These quotations not only provoke thought but also offer wisdom that can illuminate our understanding of the world and our place within it. Whether you're a seasoned scholar or a curious mind, these insights are sure to inspire and encourage deeper reflection on life's ultimate questions. Dive in and let these words guide you on your metaphysical journey.

1. “The menu is not the meal.” - Alan Watts

2. “Inevitably it follows that anyone with an independent mind must become 'one who resists or opposes an authority or established convention': a rebel. ...And if enough people come to agree with—and follow—the REBEL, we now have a DEVIL. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have ... GREATNESS.” - Nicholas Tharcher

3. “belief is the death of intelligence.” - Robert Anton Wilson

4. “The map is not the territory.” - Alfred Korzybski

5. “...reality is always plural and mutable.” - Robert Anton Wilson

6. “...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.” - Robert Anton Wilson

7. “We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.” - Robert Anton Wilson

8. “If it turns out that there is a God...the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.” - Woody Allen

9. “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.” - Carl Sagan

10. “The essence of independence has been to think and act according to standards from within, not without: to follow one's own path, not that of the crowd.” - Nicholas Tharcher

11. “We grown-up people think that we appreciate music, but if we realized the sense that an infant has brought with it of appreciating sound and rhythm, we would never boast of knowing music. The infant is music itself.” - Hazrat Inayat Khan

12. “Can all this just be an accident? Or could there be some alien intelligence behind it?” - Gene Rodenberry

13. “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” - Martin Heidegger

14. “Conscious Evolution"Conscious evolution inspires in us a mysterious and humble awareness that we have been created by this awesome process of evolution and are now being transformed by it." Barbara Marx Hubbard ” - Barbara Marx Hubbard

15. “This is the one and onlyfirmament; thereforeit is the absolute world.There is no other world.The circle is complete.I am living in Eternity.The ways of this worldare the ways of Heaven.” - Allen Ginsberg

16. “From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other - above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.” - Albert Einstein

17. “Change happens very slow and very sudden.” - Dorothy Bryant

18. “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” - Terry Pratchett

19. “One possibility is: God is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself.” - Lee Smolin

20. “A great physicist is always a metaphysicist as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.” - Ernst Jünger

21. “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” - Aldous Huxley

22. “You look like you bin whupped with a ugly stick.” - Bo Diddley

23. “What is this slow blue dream of living, and this fevered death by dreaming?” - Aberjhani

24. “Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.” - Aberjhani

25. “Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.” - Aberjhani

26. “if being is many, it must be both like and unlike, and this is impossible, for neither can the like be unlike, nor the unlike like” - Zeno

27. “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.” - Alan Wilson Watts

28. “How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask-half our great theological and metaphysical problems-are like that.” - C.S. Lewis

29. “One can ask why the I has to appear in the cogito {Descartes’ argument “I think therefore I am.}, since the cogito, if used rightly, is the awareness of pure consciousness, not directed at any fact or action. In fact the I is not necessary here, since it is never united directly to consciousness. One can even imagine a pure and self-aware consciousness which thinks of itself as impersonal spontaneity.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

30. “Don't live by my words, don't die by them, chew them slowly digest them, and smile if they give nourishment to your soul.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

31. “Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.” - Henri Frédéric Amiel

32. “I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.” - René Descartes

33. “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?” - George Orwell

34. “You are as prone to love, as the sun is to shine.” - Thomas Traherne

35. “Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.” - Aberjhani

36. “Origin of man now proved.—Metaphysics must flourish.—He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” - Charles Darwin

37. “There was a metal rod inside of Colin. The rod went from his stomach to the middle of his head. It was made of steel and sugar, and had been dissolving inside of Colin for ten or fifteen years, slow and sweet, above and behind his tongue; and he could taste it in that way, like an aftertaste, removed and seeping and outside of the mouth. Sometimes he’d glimpse it with the black, numb backs of his eyes. But what he really wanted was to wrench it out. Cut it up and chew it. Or melt it. Bathe in the hard, sweet lava of it.” - Tao Lin

38. “We know that energy can not be created nor destroyed but can be changed in it's form. If it can not be formed then it can not exist. We may not exist.” - Mohammed Ali

39. “[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.” - Samuel Butler

40. “There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.” - Koren Zailckas

41. “In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.” - Terry Eagleton

42. “In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.” - Terry Eagleton

43. “Metaphysical speculation is independent of the physical validity of the Big Bang itself and is irrelevant to our understanding of it.” - Lawrence M. Krauss

44. “I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.” - Aleister Crowley

45. “Do not be afraid of the word 'theory'. Yes, it can sound dauntingly abstract at times, and in the hands of some writers can appear to have precious little to do with the actual, visual world around us. Good theory however, is an awesome thing. [...] But unless we actually use it, it borders on the metaphysical and might as well not be used at all.” - Richard Howells

46. “For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure.” - Tom Stoppard

47. “Soon we shall discover that the temple of all humanity is nothing less that the Temple of the Living God!" ~ Chapter One, "The Awakening" ~ Discovering the Bliss of your True Divine Reality” - Reverend Dr. Linda De Coff

48. “. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?”I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.”“Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked.After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.” - Ryan Boudinot

49. “Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve.” - William James

50. “Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, although THEY will never hate him as much as he enjoys playing his game. No doubt a certain amount of what one usually calls “perversion” accounts for the pleasure, since what he enjoys, among other things, is his opacity. But that isn’t the reason THEY continue to push the conspirator to make himself a critic, to subjectivate himself as critic, nor the reason for the hate THEY so commonly express. The reason is quite simply the danger he represents. The danger, for Empire, is war machines: that one person, that people transform themselves into war machines, ORGANICALLY JOIN THEIR TASTE FOR LIFE AND THEIR TASTE FOR DESTRUCTION.” - Tiqqun

51. “Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a singular life that had helped shape many lives and with the ache of attempts to render useful service to that life. The River of Winged Dreams was therefore constructed as a link between dimensions of past and future emotions and intellect and matter and spirit.” - Aberjhani

52. “Reality is in the mind of the eye.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

53. “Fractional Multiplicity' allows for a minute amount of our energy to be present in all places at all times.” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

54. “And further, observing that all this indeterminate substance is in motion, and that no true predication can be made of that which changes, they supposed that it is impossible to make any true statement about that which is in all ways and entirely changeable. For it was from this supposition that there blossomed forth the most extreme view of those which we have mentioned, that of the professed followers of Heraclitus, and such as Cratylus held, who ended by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and who criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once.” - Aristotle

55. “A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmareto the jeweled vision of a life started anew.” - Aberjhani

56. “Life is not a fairground, but a school. -- Franz Bardon” - Franz Bardon

57. “The unity of scientific and spiritual knowledge is realized when each of the particular sciences is organically related to the supreme knowledge of al-tawhid.” - Osman Bakar

58. “The sun symbolizes the Divine intelligence; the empty vastness of space symbolizes the Divine All-Possibility and also the Divine immutability; a bird symbolizes the soul; a tree symbolizes the grades of being; and water symbolizes knowledge and rain revelation.” - Osman Bakar

59. “So live. I'll be the nun for you. I am now.” - Annie Dillard

60. “Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering, the mind could see nothing sure, nothing in all human experience to be grasped as certain, except uncertainty itself; nothing but obscurity gendered by a thick haze of theories. Man's science was a mere mist of numbers; his philosophy but a fog of words. His very perception of this rocky grain and all its wonders was but a shifting and a lying apparition. Even oneself, that seeming-central fact, was a mere phantom, so deceptive, that the most honest of men must question his own honesty, so insubstantial that he must even doubt his very existence.” - Olaf Stapledon

61. “Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon;How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.” - Rumi

62. “The degree to which your Consciousness expands, is the degree to which you understand yourself and the universe.” - Gina Charles

63. “The universe will use any vehicle and any medium to communicate with us. Our job is to be alert and to listen.” - Elaine Seiler

64. “The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.” - Anton Chekhov

65. “One can never "fall" in love, you must rise to it's level of consciousness. Love is not a feeling, it's a state of MIND!” - T.C. Carrier

66. “Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith.” - Aberjhani

67. “To understand an issue or someone’s argument about anything,one needs to understand the very nature of the issue, which is thefoundational question concerning anything.” - Reid A. Ashbaucher

68. “Attitude is a state of mind that results in an action taken or anemotion displayed. Attitude, in the end, is a motivator or that whichgenerates or reflects motives.” - Reid A. Ashbaucher

69. “That afternoon She listened to the grievances of the dead from two warring nations. Both sides had suffered, both sides had legitimate grievances, both pled their cases earnestly. She covered Her ears and moaned in misery. She knew Her humans were multidimensional and She could no longer live under the rigid architecture of Her youthful choices.” - David Eagleman

70. “Only through Absolution will you reach the Absolute.” - Toni Petrinovich

71. “But what is great can only begin great.” - Martin Heidegger

72. “Do not commit spiritual suicide through a passion for discussing metaphysical subtleties.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

73. “Morality is totally God’s standard, and his standards and conditions are revealed to us through his written word, the Scriptures (The Bible).” - Reid A. Ashbaucher

74. “Seule la totalite personnifie la verite. Neanmoins, la totalite represente simplement la nature essentielle parvenant a son etat complet au travers du processus de son propre developpement.Il doit etre dit que, fondamentalement, l'Absolu est un resultat, et c'est seulement a la fin qu'il represente ce qu'il est veritablement.” - HEGEL

75. “It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.” - Joseph Conrad 'Lord Jim'

76. “The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.” - Jorge Luis Borges

77. “If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?” - Kabir

78. “For one to define and understand the nature of the universe, one must firstunderstand the nature of the force behind its existence.” - Reid A. Ashbaucher

79. “I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.” - Christina Carson

80. “الترويض و التحكم كمثل تجربة عبور الطريق، يجب عليك المشي قليلاً لمنطقة الاختناق حتى تستطيع العبور سريعاً و سالماً؛ فالاختناق يولّد التباطؤ، و التباطؤ يولّد رؤية أوضح و حلول أكثر، و اختيارات أدق و أبرح..” - أنور هاني

81. “God structures his authority based on how he operates internally—that is, how each member of the trinity sees and interacts with each other. God never asks us to function in our obedience outside his personal examples.” - Reid A. Ashbaucher

82. “Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.” - Mark Z. Danielewski

83. “To create reality, focus beyond the outcome, as if it has already happened.” - Gregg Braden

84. “Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.” - Robert M. Pirsig

85. “Perception is the illusion that gives all matter mass," The Flight of the Eagle A.K. Luthienne” - A.K. Luthienne

86. “Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is his continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.” - Gustav Fechner

87. “My metaphysical thinking is more in alignment with Plato rather than Aristotle's." ~R. Alan Woods [2013]” - R. Alan Woods

88. “There are mystical, unbreakable bonds between all members of the natural world including humans and animals. Whether or not we remember or acknowledge this relatedness, it still exists.” - Elizabeth Eiler

89. “No non-poetic account of reality can be complete.” - John Myhill

90. “Patriarchy, reformed or unreformed, is patriarchy still: its worst abuses purged or foresworn, it might actually be more stable and secure than before.” - Kate Millett

91. “If it be true that there can be no metaphysics transcending human reason, it is no less true that there can be no empirical knowledge that is not already caught and limited by the a priori structure of cognition.” - C.G. Jung

92. “But you don’t really mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Ernest?GWENDOLEN: But your name is Ernest.JACK: Yes, I know it is. But supposing it was something else? Do you mean to say you couldn’t love me then?GWENDOLEN (glibly): Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.” - Oscar Wilde