Edmond Halley Quotes

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

To derive two or three general Principles of Motion from Phænomena, and afterwards to tell us how the Properties and Actions of all corporeal Things follow from those manifest Principles, would be a very great step in Philosophy.

It has been the error of the schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences, and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin. Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles: he can only discover them; and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Geology, perhaps more than any other department of natural philosophy, is a science of contemplation. It requires no experience or complicated apparatus, no minute processes upon the unknown processes of matter. It demands only an enquiring mind and senses alive to the facts almost everywhere presented in nature. And as it may be acquired without much difficulty, so it may be improved without much painful exertion.

I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

Fiction supplies the only philosophy that may readers know; it establishes their ethical, social, and material standards; it confirms them in their prejudices or opens their minds to a wider world.

"To be or not to be is" [by William Shakespeare] beyond anything I can comprehend. I understand it on a superficial level, but the depth of it just boggles my mind. I think it's probably the greatest of all speeches ever written.

No being exists or can exist which is not related to space in some way. God is everywhere, created minds are somewhere, and body is in the space that it occupies; and whatever is neither everywhere nor anywhere does not exist. And hence it follows that space is an effect arising from the first existence of being, because when any being is postulated, space is postulated.

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

The state of man's mind, or the elementary phase of mind which he so far possesses, conforms precisely to the state of the world as he so far views it

What is at issue is the conversion of the mind from the twilight of error to the truth, that climb up into the real world which we shall call true philosophy.

Man's mind and spirit grow with the space in which they are allowed to operate.

The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods.

All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.

There's something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.

Tis true, 'tis certain; man, though dead, retains Part of himself; the immortal mind remains.

As I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, or which [his family] profoundly disapproved. Everytime the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, "What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." After some fifty or sixty repititions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

Metaphysics, in whatever latitude the term be taken, is a science, or complement of sciences, exclusively occupied with mind.

All the resources we need are in the mind.

I needn't tell you that success and failure prove nothing - the whole thing is a lottery. It's pleasant to succeed; but for a philosophic mind it oughtn't to be very upsetting to fail.

Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery... a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all of the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness.

There are three kinds of minds: first those that attain insight and understanding of things by their own means, then those that recognize what is right when others explain it to them, and finally those that are capable of neither one nor the other.

Even if your body doesn't work the way it used to, the heart and the mind and the spirit are not diminished.