Eugene Wigner Quotes

We have the notion that we exist but we have no way to prove it. 'I am' is the closest foundation we can get.

No school of philosophy has ever solved this question of whether being determines consciousness or the other way around. It may be a false antithesis.

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

To be is to be perceived

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

The question of the composition of perceptible objects is one which already occupied the mind of the ancient Greeks.

I fear that, in the end, the famous debate among materialists, idealists, and dualists amounts to a merely verbal dispute that is more a matter for the linguist than for the speculative philosopher.

Metaphysics is a science.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

We might be allowed to... assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.

I think, therefore I am.

In many cases, contemporary materialisms map uncannily well onto Pre-Socratic ideas such that instead of Anaximander, we have the physicist David Bohm and his idea of an underlying 'implicate order' that transcends time and space.

'Do not touch ontologically' doesn't mean 'are separated by empirically measurable hard edges.'

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness.

One way of saying that is that there is an objective reality beyond our mind. A way to think of this in a philosophic sense is to look between the two great extremes: the idealist philosophy that says mind and consciousness is the only thing and that matter is simply an illusion, or a Maya, the product of mind; and the other extreme, a strict materialist determinism, which says that mind and consciousness is a secondary phenomenon of the collision of matter.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Beware of solipsism Funny word. Sounds like it means "love of melons" or something. I looked it up. It means believing that "the self is the only reality." Am I solipsist?

The material universe exists only in the mind.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

This whole world is mind's world, the product of the mind.

...physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.