16 quotes
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
The Life of the Mind (1978)
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
The Life of the Mind (1978)
To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
The Life of the Mind (1971)
If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Kant ... discovered “the scandal of reason,” that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Kant [...] stated that he had “found it necessary to deny knowledge […] to make room for faith,” but all he had “denied” was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
What is so remarkable in all these theories and doctrines is their implicit monism, the claim that behind the obvious multiplicity of the world’s appearances and, even more pertinently to our context, behind the obvious plurality of man’s faculties and abilities, there must exist a oneness — the old hen pan, “the all is one”—either a single source or a single ruler.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
Kant stated defensively that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge. . . to make room for faith," but he had not made room for faith; he had made room for thought, and he had not "denied knowledge" but separated knowledge from thinking.
The Life of the Mind (1971)
[…]the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.
The Life of the Mind (1971)