87 Quotes About Ontology

In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.

In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire--in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation--that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for life-in-itself clothes itself in the sex drive--belongs to the particularity of being human.

Imagination, there on high—To high to breathe free, after such a climb—Had lost its power; but now, just like a wheelThat spins so evenly it measures timeBy space, the deepest wish that I could feelAnd all my will, were turning with the loveThat moves the sun and all the stars above.

And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.

Never forget, an argument isn’t wrong by line 1,000. It is wrong by the end of line 1. It is wrong in the first, defining claim it makes.

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore.

When Jesus says to Simon, "Follow me," the response is a single act of faith and obedience; there is no gap between a mental action of believing and a bodily action of following. The human person is not a mind attached to a body but a single psychosomatic being.

We are in an outside that carries inner worlds.