Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Ernest Holmes

Quote by Ernest Holmes

Author

Ernest Holmes
Ernest Holmes

Ernest Holmes was a renowned writer, born on January 21, 1887, and passed away on April 7, 1960. His works covered a range of fields including philosophy, religion, and self-help, which were well-received by readers. more

You May Also Like

“Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce ‘proofs’ of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors — Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' — but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deepseated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.”

“Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years; they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet... a vole. It's a remarkable thing in its way, a vole—intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it... Does it help? Does it move the matter on? When you ask a question that you'd actually like to know the answer to—what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death—they say that your question can't be answered, because the terms in which you've put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. Vole is—as we have agreed—the answer; so it follows that your questions must therefore all be vole-related.”

“1. God is (by definition) a being than which no greater being can be thought. 2. Greatness includes greatness of virtue. 3. Therefore, God is a being than which no being could be more virtuous. 4. But virtue involves overcoming pains and dangers. 5. Indeed, a being can only be properly said to be virtuous if it can suffer pain or be destroyed. 6. A God that can suffer pain or is destructible is not one than which no greater being can be thought. 7.For you can think of a greater being, that is, one that is nonsuffering and indestructible. 8. Therefore, God does not exist.”

“I have previously reduced the whole science of logic to two facts. The first is that our perceptions being every thing for us, we are perfectly, completely, and necessarily sure of whatever we actually feel. The second is that consequently none of our judgments, separately taken, can be erroneous: inasmuch as we see one idea in another it is actually there; but their falsity, when it takes place, is purely relative to anterior judgments, which we permit to subsist; and it consists in this, that we believe the idea in which we perceive a new element to be the same as that we have always had under the same sign, when it is really different, since the new element which we actually see there is incompatible with some of those which we have previously seen; so that to avoid contradiction we must either take away the former or not admit the latter.”