Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Abhijit Naskar

Quote by Abhijit Naskar

Work

World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Abhijit Naskar

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Abhijit Naskar. more

You May Also Like

“For Hume, Pyrrhonism, like other philosophies, is too ready to assume that our actions are, or at least ought to be, guided by reason at all times. That is looking in the wrong place for the sources of our motivation. The world itself never provides adequate motivation for our choices. It is not the weighing of external evidence but internal desire that determines judgement and action: ‘Nothing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion, but a contrary impulse.’ Indeed, as Bernard Williams later argued, perhaps the very idea of a (purely) external reason is incoherent because there is no account of what is involved in accepting an external reason that does not invoke internal motivation.”

ReasonPhilosophySkepticismDavid Hume
Book:The Concept of the Social: Scepticism Idleness and Utopia
Create image

“My reason is simply a greedy lawyer hired by my guilty instincts, feelings, and values to prove them innocent. This lawyer is responsible to conserve and protect my identity from sudden changes. If I adjust my beliefs too quickly and too often—I risk going insane. I’m open-minded only in the sense that my mind is closed by openable windows.”

ReasonOpen Mindedness
Book:The Sovereign Artist: Meditations on Lifestyle Design
Create image

“Then one morning she’d begun to feel her sorrow easing, like something jagged that had cut into her so long it had finally dulled its edges, worn itself down. That same day Rachel couldn’t remember which side her father had parted his hair on, and she’d realized again what she’d learned at five when her mother left – that what made losing someone you loved bearable was not remembering but forgetting. Forgetting the small things first, the smell of the soap her mother had bathed with, the color of the dress she’d worn to church, then after a while the sound of her mother’s voice, the color of her hair. It amazed Rachel how much you could forget, and everything you forgot made that person less alive inside you until you could finally endure it. After more time passed you could let yourself remember, even want to remember. But even then what you felt those first days could return and remind you the grief that was still there, like old barbed wire embedded in a tree’s heartwood.”

DeathGriefSorrowEndureMemoryForgettingRemembering
Book:Serena
Create image

“Schopenhauer’s will can be “equated” to the categorical imperative of the idea (reason), which is the will. Without the will, the idea is dead. If the idea is the essence of the Being, then the will is its manifestation as existence. Only through the categorical will of the essence (ultimate universal idea) is existence possible.”

ReasonDejan StojanovicWillAbsoluteBeingIdeaNonbeingUniversal IdeaCategorical WillUniversal Mid
Book:ABSOLUTE
Create image

“The five movements last mentioned-naturalism, instrumentalism, positivism, linguistic analysis, existentialism-are perhaps the most influential philosophic movements of recent years, and they are all derogatory of reason in its traditional use. This is particularly striking because philosophy is, supposedly, an attempt on the nature of things by reason, and if that attempt is futile, philosophy would appear to be futile too. But the rebellion of the last half century has gone far beyond philosophy; indeed it has broken out in every department of culture, and in most of them with marked virulence.”

ReasonPhilosophyReasoning
Book:Reason & Analysis
Create image

“Kant bases upon the fact, that in all religions old and new which are partly comprised in sacred books, intelligent and well-meaning teachers of the people have continued to explain them, until they have brought their actual contents into agreement with the universal principles of morality. Thus did the moral philosophers amongst the Greeks and Romans with their fabulous legends; till at last they explained the grossest polytheism as mere symbolical representations of the attributes of the one divine Being, and gave a mystical sense to the many vicious actions of their gods, [...] in order to bring the popular faith, which it was not expedient to destroy, into agreement with the doctrines of morality. The later Judaism and Christianity itself he thinks have been formed upon similar explanations, occasionally much forced, but always directed to objects undoubtedly good and necessary for all men. Thus the Mahometans gave a spiritual meaning to the sensual descriptions of their paradise, and thus the Hindoos, [...] interpreted their Vedas. In like manner, [...] the Christian Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, must be interpreted throughout in a sense which agrees with the universal practical laws of a religion of pure reason”

ReasonPhilosophyReligionChristianityInterpretationKant
Book:The life of Jesus critically examined / by Dr. David Friedrich Strauss. Tr. from the 4th German ed. by George Eliot. 1913 [Leather Bound]
Create image