Cat Philosophy Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Cat Philosophy. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat’s Cradle)
It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.
H.P. Lovecraft (Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany)
What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
Henry David Thoreau (Thoreau Journal 9)
A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it.
H.L. Mencken
Cats don't need to be possessed; they're evil on their own.
Peter Kreeft
Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?
Edgar Allan Poe (The Black Cat)
A few years ago it dawned on me that everybody past a certain age ... pretty much constantly dreams of being able to escape from their lives. They don't want to be who they are any more. They want out. This list includes Thurston Howell the Third, Ann-Margret, the cat members of Rent, Václav Havel, space shuttle astronauts and Snuffleupagus. It's universal.
Douglas Coupland (The Gum Thief)
If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.
Martin Gardner (The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener)
Killing and dying for nonsensical ideas is how many human beings have made sense of their lives.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
When people say their goal in life is to be happy they are telling you they are miserable.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It's the stuff we can understand. It's cats that are complicated. I mean, what is it in those little molecules and stuff that make one cat behave differently than another, or that make a cat? And how do you define a cat? I have no idea.
John H. Conway
Humans need something other than the human world, or else they go mad.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
When a black cat crosses your path, follow it. Understand the knowable unknown.
Lionel Suggs
These sociopaths,' he said. 'What do they feel like? Inside?' Isabel smiled. 'Unmoved,' she said. 'They feel unmoved. Look at a cat when it does something wrong. It looks quite unmoved. Cats are sociopaths, you see. It's their natural state.
Alexander McCall Smith (The Sunday Philosophy Club (Isabel Dalhousie, #1))
It is good to be a cynic--it is better to be a contented cat--and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world--we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
H.P. Lovecraft (Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany)
I am not the lonely human, plunked down on earth to aimlessly wander. I am a part of that earth and not going anywhere- just like the spider up in the corner, the dust on the sill, and the cat I buried in the backyard. -Jamaica Ritcher.
Jay Allison (This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women)
Cats are great teachers! Their teaching is very simple: You are too busy with life; give time to yourself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For millennia philosophers and saints have tried to reason out a logical scheme for the universe... until Hilda came along and demonstrated that the universe is not logical but whimsical, its structure depending solely on the dreams and nightmares of non-logical dreamers.
Robert A. Heinlein (The Cat Who Walks Through Walls)
I recall the story of the philosopher and the theologian... The two were engaged in disputation and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat — which wasn't there. ‘That may be,’ said the philosopher, ‘but a theologian would have found it.
Julian Huxley
My tried-and-true philosophy of keeping people at a distance was taking a beating lately. It wasn't working so well with Mircea, and Pritkin had somehow bulldozed past every defense I had before I'd even noticed. I still wasn't sure how he'd done it. He wasn't that good-looking, he had the social skills of a wet cat and the patience of a caffeinated hummingbird. In between crazy stunts and, okay, saving my life, he was just really annoying. When we'd started working together, I'd assumed it would be a question of putting up with Pritkin; then suddenly the stupid hair was making me smile, and the sporadic heroics were making my heart jump and the constant bitching had me wanting to kiss him quiet. And now I cared more than was good for me.
Karen Chance (Curse the Dawn (Cassandra Palmer, #4))
All these philosophies(Stoicism,Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism)have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the Mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss ,or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss. In fact ,neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body.Much of human life -and much of philosophy - is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Dune; Nova; Double Star; The Corridors of Time; Cat's Cradle; Half Past Human; Murder in Retrospect; Gideon's Day; The Red Right Hand; The Trojan Hearse; A Deadly Shade of Gold; Conjure Wife; Rosemary's Baby; Silverlock; King Conan. He'd packed books not to entertain, nor even to illustrate philosophies of life, but to rebuild civilization.
Larry Niven (Lucifer's Hammer)
The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.
May Sarton (The Fur Person)
Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.
Robert Anton Wilson (Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy)
Philosophy is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat. Metaphysics is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there. Theology is like being in a dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there, and shouting "I found it!" Science is like being in a dark room looking for a black cat while using a flashlight.
Anonymous
Instead of being a sign of their inferiority, the lack of abstract thinking among cats is a mark of their freedom of mind. Thinking in generalities slides easily into a superstitious faith in language. Much of the history of philosophy consists of the worship of linguistic fictions. Relying on what they can touch, smell and see, cats are not ruled by words. Philosophy testifies to the frailty of the human mind. Humans philosophize for the same reason they pray. They know the meaning they have fashioned in their lives is fragile and live in dread of its breaking down. Death is the ultimate breakdown in meaning, since it marks the end of any story they have told themselves.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind.
Robert M. Pirsig
The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?
Alexander McCall Smith (The Sunday Philosophy Club (Isabel Dalhousie, #1))
Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live. Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Humans were always trying to fit in. Many of them didn’t feel like they belonged. When someone came along and was brave enough to show the truth of who they were, flaws and all, it could inspire others to accept themselves as they were.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn (The Cat Who Ate His Tail)
Each man must make is own sacred journey.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e.g., “My telling you where to find the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.
Gregory Bateson
The source of philosophy is anxiety, and cats do not suffer from anxiety unless they are threatened or find themselves in a strange place. For humans, the world itself is a threatening and strange place. Religions are attempts to make an inhuman universe humanly habitable. Philosophers have often dismissed these faiths as being far beneath their own metaphysical speculations, but religion and philosophy serve the same need.1 Both try to fend off the abiding disquiet that goes with being human.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Jocul, ispravit mereu printr-o cazatura, nu era decat o poveste care anunta viitorul. Asa cum sunt toate jocurile copilariei: marionetele ne arata cat de scurta si de tulburata ne e viata, de-a v-ati ascunselea ne invata cum se cauta emotiile, Inelus-invartecus, cat ai de alergat ca sa-ti indeplinesti dorintele, iar de-a baba oarba, dragostea oarba si dibuitul.
Martha Bibescu (Catherine-Paris)
1 Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable Trying to persuade human beings to be rational is like trying to teach cats to be vegans. Human beings use reason to bolster whatever they want to believe, seldom to find out if what they believe is true. This may be unfortunate, but there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it. If human unreason frustrates or endangers you, walk away.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Morality has many charms. What could be more captivating than a vision of everlasting justice? Yet visions of justice are as immutable as styles in shoes. What morality demands shifts across the generations and may change more than once within a single human lifetime. Not so long ago morality required spreading civilization by extending imperial power. Today, morality condemns empire in all its forms. These judgements are irreconcilably opposed. But they provide the same satisfaction to those who pronounce them – a gratifying sense of virtue.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
You can be in paradise only when you do not know what it is like to be in paradise. As soon as you know, paradise is gone. No effort of thought can take you back, for thought – the conscious awareness of yourself as a mortal being – is the Fall. In the Garden of Eden, the primordial human pair are clothed in ignorance of themselves. When they come to self-awareness, they find they are naked. Thinking of yourself is the gift of the serpent that cannot be returned.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
In 1967, the second resolution to the cat problem was formulated by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose work was pivotal in laying the foundation of quantum mechanics and also building the atomic bomb. He said that only a conscious person can make an observation that collapses the wave function. But who is to say that this person exists? You cannot separate the observer from the observed, so maybe this person is also dead and alive. In other words, there has to be a new wave function that includes both the cat and the observer. To make sure that the observer is alive, you need a second observer to watch the first observer. This second observer is called “Wigner’s friend,” and is necessary to watch the first observer so that all waves collapse. But how do we know that the second observer is alive? The second observer has to be included in a still-larger wave function to make sure he is alive, but this can be continued indefinitely. Since you need an infinite number of “friends” to collapse the previous wave function to make sure they are alive, you need some form of “cosmic consciousness,” or God. Wigner concluded: “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Toward the end of his life, he even became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. In this approach, God or some eternal consciousness watches over all of us, collapsing our wave functions so that we can say we are alive. This interpretation yields the same physical results as the Copenhagen interpretation, so this theory cannot be disproven. But the implication is that consciousness is the fundamental entity in the universe, more fundamental than atoms. The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest To Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind)
Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from it. "What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God, having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected.
Victor Hugo (Les Misérables)
If a black cat crosses your path, don't move ahead." This is a fictitious rule but the submissive energy you feel when you follow this rule, and dominating energy you feel when you rebel against it are real. Every tribe and society has such absurd rules because mankind has always taken great interest in creating something real out of unreal.
Shunya
The best lover has fur and four legs and is the most trustworthy heart.
Debasish Mridha
1 Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Do not become attached to your suffering, and avoid those who do.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
5 Forget about pursuing happiness, and you may find it
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Whereas cats live by following their nature, humans live by suppressing theirs.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
2 It is foolish to complain that you do not have enough time
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Live and breath like the creatures we admire.
Monaristw
All animals contain a part of God, but only the cat knows it.
Neel Burton (Indian Mythology and Philosophy: The Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Kama Sutra… And How They Fit Together (Ancient Wisdom))
What should I do?' Coyote yelled. 'Cultivate philosophy and run like hell,' said Bear...
Roger Zelazny (Eye of Cat)
He would never do anything other than what felt most important to him - and he had no problem doing it alone, at his own speed, without needing validation from the people around him.
Genki Kawamura (If Cats Disappeared from the World)
At bottom, hatred of cats may be an expression of envy. Many human beings lead lives of muffled misery. Torturing other creatures is a relief, since it inflicts worse suffering on them. Tormenting cats is particularly satisfying, since they are so satisfied in themselves. Cat-hatred is very often the self-hatred of misery-sodden human beings redirected against creatures they know are not unhappy.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
A philosopher once assured me he had persuaded his cat to become a vegan. Believing he was joking, I asked how he had achieved this feat. Had he supplied the cat with mouse-flavoured vegan titbits? Had he introduced his cat to other cats, already practising vegans, as feline role models? Or had he argued with the cat and persuaded it that eating meat is wrong? My interlocutor was not amused. I realized he actually believed the cat had opted for a meat-free diet. So I ended our exchange with a question: did the cat go out? It did, he told me. That solved the mystery. Plainly, the cat was feeding itself by visiting other homes and hunting. If it brought any carcasses home – a practice to which ethically undeveloped cats are sadly all too prone – the virtuous philosopher had managed not to notice them.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
I will repeat the only advice which has ever really resonated with me re: pain—emotional as well as physical—which is: It’s not always going to feel the way it feels today. It’s just true & key to remember.
Cat Marnell (How to Murder Your Life)
Imagine that you are watching a movie which is so engaging that you forget yourself. Suppose that the movie is not 3 hours long but millions of years long. Of course, a human protagonist can’t have such a long story. So, the protagonist of the movie is someone who changes forms from human to cow to monkey to tree to dog to cat and so on... Then who are you and who is the protagonist of the movie? Aren’t you the eternal power watching your own story unfold before you?
Shunya
Another scholar who recognized an affinity between Spinozist and Taoist ethics was the Norwegian Jon Wetlesen. In The Sage and the Way: Spinoza’s Ethics of Freedom, Wetlesen writes that Taoism ‘does not aim at becoming what one is not, but in being what one is.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Or, cine isi cunoaste clipa de fata, pana nu devine trecut? Sensul ei total ne apare mai tarziu, asa cum mergand pe un drum necunoscut, desi avem iluzia ca il cunoastem cu fiecare pas pe care il facem, abia uitandu-ne in urma ne dam seama cat de drept sau de sinuos a fost...
Marin Preda (Viața ca o pradă)
The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say "My daughter is a nurse," or "My daughter is a school teacher," or even, "My daughter is a chemical engineer." You could not say, "My daughter is a philosopher." That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn't like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard To Find)
Later she told me that many of her friends are Muslim. I told her the story of that one time I went to Istanbul and hundreds of Turkish men DM’d me pictures of their cats. It was a nice break from the poorly lit dick pics and the demands to “fukx me” sent by douchebags of all nations and faiths.
Stoya (Philosophy, Pussycats, and Porn)
Because it was not founded upon an eternity-philosophy, a doctrine of divinity dwelling in all living creatures, the modern movement in favour of kindness to animals was and is perfectly compatible with intolerance, persecution and systematic cruelty towards human beings. Young Nazis are taught to be gentle with dogs and cats, ruthless with Jews. That is because Nazism is a typical time-philosophy, which regards the ultimate good as existing, not in eternity, but in the future. Jews are, ex hypothesi, obstacles in the way of the realization of the supreme good; dogs and cats are not. The rest follows logically.
Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy)
A lion never loses sleep over a sheep’s sentiments. A fox never loses sleep over a rabbit’s sentiments. A bird never loses sleep over a worm’s sentiments. A cat never loses sleep over a mouse’s sentiments. A monkey never loses sleep over a fruit’s sentiments. A crocodile never loses sleep over a fish’s sentiments. A chameleon never loses sleep over an insect’s sentiments. A hyena never loses sleep over a corpse’s sentiments. A serpent never loses sleep over a mouse’s sentiments. A dog never loses sleep over a rodent’s sentiments. A dog’s appetite is served by its boldness. A serpent’s appetite is served by its craftiness. A hyena’s appetite is served by its covetousness. A chameleon’s appetite is served by its deceptiveness. A crocodile’s appetite is served by its fierceness. A monkey’s appetite is served by its skillfulness. A cat’s appetite is served by its inquisitiveness. A bird’s appetite is served by its swiftness. A fox’s appetite is served by its wittiness. A lion’s appetite is served by its fearlessness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Christopher Argent kept stealing disbelieving looks at Farah, his blue eyes reflecting the ambient glow like an alley cat's. Dorian understood why the man would dare in his presence. First, because Christopher Argent was an unfeeling, fearless killer-for-hire. And second, because most of the incarcerated men at Newgate had considered Dougan's Fairy some mythical creature, a sight too rare and beautiful to be beheld by a common man. Maybe even a fancy born of an imagination keen enough to take possession of the prison. To meet her was to gaze upon a fantasy realized, to remember the desperate yearnings of a lonely prisoner bereft of kindness, mercy, or beauty. To be blinded by the embodiment of all three of those things. For a man like Argent, one born to incarceration, the sight might have him reassessing some long-held cynical philosophies.
Kerrigan Byrne (The Highwayman (Victorian Rebels, #1))
Politics has become so all-possessive of life, that by impertinence it thinks the only philosophy a person can hold is the right or the left. This question puts out all the lights of religion so they can call all the cats gray. It assumes that man lives on a purely horizontal plane, and can move only to the right or the left. Had we eyes less material, we would see that there are two other directions where a man with a soul may look: the vertical directions of “up” or “down.
Fulton J. Sheen (Characters of the Passion)
To begin with the logical objection: 'When we have found a resemblance among several objects,' Hume says, 'we apply the same name to all of them.' Every nominalist would agree. But in fact a common name, such as 'cat,' is just as unreal as the universal CAT is. The nominalist solution of the problem of universals thus fails through being insufficiently drastic in the application of its own principles; it mistakenly applies these principles only to 'things,' and not also to words.
Bertrand Russell (History of Western Philosophy)
I was raised as a churchgoer but I wasn't a practising Christian. I wasn't an agnostic or atheist either. My view is that we should all take a bit from every religion and philosophy. I'm not a Buddhist but I like Buddhist philosophies, in particular. They give you a very good structure that you can build your life around. For instance, I definitely believe in karma, the idea that what goes around, comes around. I wondered whether Bob was my reward for having done something good, somewhere in my troubled life. - Chapter 21
James Bowen (A Street Cat Named Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets)
More plausibly, a subjective view of ethics is a result of the hollowing out of religion. Expressed in universal laws or commands, ‘morality’ is a relic of monotheism. If there is no author of these edicts, what authority can they have? In religion, the author was God. Later, with the rise of the Enlightenment, it came to be ‘humanity’. But humankind cannot be the author of anything, since there is no such thing as a universal human agent. All that exists is the multitudinous human animal, with its many different moralities.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
To determine the truth or falsity of a statement you not only need to a set of special experiences, but you need to know the truth of falsity of a host of other different statements as well. That is, verifying that the cat is on the mat is not a matter of experience alone, but of accepting all sorts of other different statements, all the way from "Light rays travel in straight lines" to "I am not having another one of those darn flashbacks." "Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python
Gary L. Hardcastle (Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! (Popular Culture and Philosophy, 19))
Cats have no need of philosophy. Obeying their nature, they are content with the life it gives them. In humans, on the other hand, discontent with their nature seems to be natural. With predictably tragic and farcical results, the human animal never ceases striving to be something that it is not. Cats make no such effort. Much of human life is a struggle for happiness. Among cats, on the other hand, happiness is the state to which they default when practical threats to their well-being are removed. That may be the chief reason many of us love cats. They possess as their birthright a felicity humans regularly fail to attain.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
The natural world gives us many examples of the great effectiveness of this way. The Chinese philosophy of which judo itself is an expression—Taoism—drew attention to the power of water to overcome all obstacles by its gentleness and pliability. It showed how the supple willow survives the tough pine in a snowstorm, for whereas the unyielding branches of the pine accumulate snow until they crack, the springy boughs of the willow bend under its weight, drop the snow, and jump back again. If, when swimming, you are caught in a strong current, it is fatal to resist. You must swim with it and gradually edge to the side. One who falls from a height with stiff limbs will break them, but if he relaxes like a cat he will fall safely. A building without 'give' in its structure will easily collapse in storm or earthquake, and a car without the cushioning of tires and springs will soon come apart on the road. The mind has just the same powers, for it has give and can absorb shocks like water or a cushion. But this giving way to an opposing force is not at all the same thing as running away. A body of water does not run away when you push it; it simply gives at the point of the push and encloses your hand. A shock absorber does not fall down like a bowling-pin when struck; it gives, and yet stays in the same place. To run away is the only defense of something rigid against an overwhelming force. Therefore the good shock absorber has not only 'give,' but also stability or 'weight.
Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety)
Sell books that sell—that’s the rule.” A curious phrase indeed. A curious phrase that had a bizarre ring to it. “That’s right,” said the president. “Here at the world’s number one publishing company, we don’t publish books to inform or teach people. We print the books that society wants. We don’t care about issues such as messages that need to be imparted, or philosophy that needs to be handed down to the next generation. We don’t care about any harsh reality or difficult truths. Society isn’t interested in things like that. Publishers don’t need to worry about what they should be telling the world; they need to understand what the world wants to hear.” “It’s dangerous to be that cynical.” “And you have an excellent mind to have noticed that it’s cynical.
Sōsuke Natsukawa (The Cat Who Saved Books (The Cat Who..., #1))
More and more people will start telling themselves: "I don't understand what all these neuroexperts and consciousness philosophers are talking about, but the upshot seems pretty clear to me. The cat is out of the bag: We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe. We have brains but no immortal souls, and after seventy years or so the curtain drops. There will never be an afterlife, or any kind of reward or punishment for anyone, and ultimately everyone is alone. I get the message, and you had better believe I will adjust my behavior to it. It would probably be smart not to let anybody know I've seen through the game. The most efficient strategy will be to go on pretending I'm a conservative, old-fashioned believer in moral values.
Thomas Metzinger (The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self)
When a cat falls out of a tree, it lets go of itself. The cat becomes completely relaxed, and lands lightly on the ground. But if a cat were about to fall out of a tree and suddenly make up its mind that it didn’t want to fall, it would become tense and rigid, and would be just a bag of broken bones upon landing. [I]t is the philosophy of the Tao that…the moment we were born we were kicked off a precipice and we are falling, and there is nothing that can stop it. So instead of living in a state of chronic tension, and clinging to all sorts of things that are actually falling with us because the whole world is impermanent, be like a cat. —Alan Watts, What Is Tao? Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? —Lao Tzu
Kaira Jewel Lingo (We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons for Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption)
People can be, like, "you're not really that important for me to stay." And they expect me to say things like, "I can show you how important I am, more than the others", thus expecting this whole dance-of-the-human to ensue. Listen, I don't do dance-of-the-human. I am here in this place where moonlight is the only light and I don't need to be the Sun. The Moon is okay. And some people prefer the Sun, and that's okay too. I have cozy things where I am: quietness and a cat. And big windows and tea. I can let people like other things that are not me. I'm not going to be doing that dance with you. If you want to stay with me, it's going to be because you want to be near me and if you don't want to be near me then that means you want to be near someone or something else. That's okay. I don't have to be everything. I only have to be me.
C. JoyBell C.
Adam and Aaron. Aaron because I was in love, Adam because he beat me. I met Adam first, then Aaron. The wound, then the salve. Maybe you don't know that you're wounded until you receive the salve. The salve that makes everything come back. After you get beaten, you don't go out. Your face swells into a snout. You don't buy Tylenol or groceries, because you'd look like an animal loosened onto the streets. Animal control would mistake you for something else. Instead, I stayed indoors. I washed the blood off the walls and the sheets. The splattered pillow I kept as evidence, not for anyone else, just for myself. I listened to music. Cat Power, The Covers Record. I caught up on my reading. From Primer to Abuse: Practiced abusers don't hit a woman in the face. The novice abuser is pushed to it only by extreme, uncontrollable conditions. I read it again. Not 'conditions'; 'emotions.' I brushed up on philosophy: To live is to exist within time. To remember is to negate time.
Ling Ma
If you can’t make a good prediction, it is very often harmful to pretend that you can. I suspect that epidemiologists, and others in the medical community, understand this because of their adherence to the Hippocratic oath. Primum non nocere: First, do no harm. Much of the most thoughtful work on the use and abuse of statistical models and the proper role of prediction comes from people in the medical profession.88 That is not to say there is nothing on the line when an economist makes a prediction, or a seismologist does. But because of medicine’s intimate connection with life and death, doctors tend to be appropriately cautious. In their field, stupid models kill people. It has a sobering effect. There is something more to be said, however, about Chip Macal’s idea of “modeling for insights.” The philosophy of this book is that prediction is as much a means as an end. Prediction serves a very central role in hypothesis testing, for instance, and therefore in all of science.89 As the statistician George E. P. Box wrote, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.”90 What he meant by that is that all models are simplifications of the universe, as they must necessarily be. As another mathematician said, “The best model of a cat is a cat.”91 Everything else is leaving out some sort of detail. How pertinent that detail might be will depend on exactly what problem we’re trying to solve and on how precise an answer we require.
Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin's theory had two parts. On the one hand, there was the doctrine of evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is now generally accepted, was not new. It had been maintained by Lamarck and by Darwin's grandfather Erasmus, not to mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied an immense mass of evidence for the doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have discovered the cause of evolution. He thus gave to the doctrine a popularity and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no means originated it. The second part of Darwin's theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in each generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every measurable characteristic. In a given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best chance. Therefore among chance variations those that are favourable will preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age deer run more swiftly, cats stalk their prey more silently, and giraffes' necks become longer. Given enough time, this mechanism, so Darwin contended, could account for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
Self-Obsession & Self-Presentation on Social-Media" Some people always post their cars/bikes photos because they love their cars/bikes so much. Some people always post their dogs/cats/birds/fish/pets photos because they love their pets so much. Some people always post their children’s/families photos because they love their children/families so much. Some people always post their daily happy/sad moments because they love sharing their daily lives so much. Some people always post their poems/songs/novels/writings because they love being poets/lyricists/novelists/writers so much. Some people always copy paste other people’s writings/quotes without mentioning the actual writers name because they love seeking attention/fame so much. [Unacceptable & Illegal] Some people always post their plants/garden’s photos because they love planting/gardening so much. Some people always post their art/paintings because they love their creativity so much. Some people always post their home-made food because they love cooking/thoughtful-presentation so much. Some people always post their makeup/hairstyles selfies because they love wearing makeup/doing hair so much. Some people always post their party related photos because they love those parties so much. Some people always post their travel related photos because they love traveling so much. Some people always post their selfies because they love taking selfies so much. Some people always post restaurant/street-foods because they love eating in restaurants/streets so much. Some people always post their job-related photos because they love their jobs so much. Some people always post religious things because they love spreading their religion so much. Some people always post political things because they love politics/power so much. Some people always post inspirational messages because they love being spiritual. Some people always share others posts because they love sharing links so much. Some people always post their creative photographs because they love photography so much. Some people always post their business-related products because they love advertising so much. And some people always post complaints about other people’s post because they love complaining so much
Zakia FR
Children, like cats, made a house into a home, and the echoes of their presence lingered.
Alexander McCall Smith (The Right Attitude to Rain (Sunday Philosophy Club, #3))
Farm animals aren't the only ones that suffer at the hands of human beings. Scientists use animals for their research. It's not just rats and guinea pigs – cats, dogs, monkeys and even chimpanzees can be found in laboratories, many of them suffering pain and distress as they are drugged or given electric shocks. Singer's test to see if any research is morally acceptable is this: would we be prepared to perform the same experiment on a brain-damaged human being? If not, he believes, it is not right to perform the experiment on an animal with a similar level of mental awareness. This is a tough test, and not many experiments would pass it. In practice, then, Singer is very strongly against using animals in research. The
Nigel Warburton (A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories))
We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first.
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
A rainbow is a Cheshire Cat wearing Jacob's coat of many colours
Steve O'Grady (Right Back at You - Being Human in a Simulated Universe)
A funambulist!" muttered Isabel. Eddie, moving towards the door, stopped. "What's that?" Isabel explained. "Cat's new boyfriend. A funambulist. One who walks on tightropes." Like all of us, she thought. In the final analysis.
Alexander McCall Smith (The Lost Art of Gratitude (Isabel Dalhousie, #6))
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it also made her life more interesting. The simple fact is, something always kills the cat. It was actually quite wise of her to choose something stimulating to perform that invaluable service.
George Hammond
Morality has many charms. What could be more captivating than a vision of everlasting justice? Yet visions of justice are as immutable as styles in shoes.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
There’s no philosophy behind it and no taste. No matter how rich and wonderful it all looks on the outside, when you take off the lid and look inside there’s nothing but a jumble of borrowed junk. It’s the worst kind of ignorance.
Sōsuke Natsukawa (The Cat Who Saved Books (The Cat Who..., #1))
If some fools believe in gods, demons, magic, black cats, and other nonsense, that’s not such a big deal. It’s even useful. Let them play. But if people like you begin to believe in these fantasies, then it’s an alarming symptom. There’s nothing more dangerous for a stable society than an intelligent, active idealist who fancies whatever he might.
Andrew Orange (The Outside Intervention)
As Montaigne put it, ‘There is a plague on Man: his opinion that he knows something.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
Humans are self-divided creatures whose lives are mostly spent in displacement activity.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
God is Schrodinger's cat, one moment it's there, the next it's not - all depends on the state of mind - God is the oldest fear-bending construct.
Abhijit Naskar (The Humanitarian Dictator)
God is Schrodinger's cat, one moment it's there, the next it's not - all depends on the state of mind - God is the oldest fear-bending construct. Problem is when apes use God to enforce fear, a healthy refuge is rendered harmful refuse.
Abhijit Naskar (The Humanitarian Dictator)
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
John Gray (Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life)
It is only in the philosophy of the seminar room that serious doubts are raised as to weather or not dogs and cats and other animals have consciousness. We all know how aware they are of their surroundings... and of us... they leave no doubt when they are in pain...
Daniel N. Robinson (Consciousness and Its Implications)
Regaring Politics: You’ve got your cats on one side and your dogs on the other; someone has to walk the fence and feed the animals. —Kinky Friedman
Ray Palla (SIMPLE TRIPLE STANDARD)
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about - yet. There have been other great mysteries: the mystery of the origin of the universe, the mystery of life and reproduction, the mystery of the design to be found in nature, the mysteries of time, space and gravity. These were not just areas of scientific ignorance, but of utter bafflement and wonder. We do not yet have the final answers to any of the questions of cosmology and particle physics, molecular genetics and evolutionary theory, but we do know how to think about them. The mysteries haven't vanished, but they have been tamed. They no longer overwhelm our efforts to think about the phenomena, because now we know how to tell the misbegotten questions from the right questions, and even if we turn out to be dead wrong about some of the currently accepted answers, we know how to go about looking for better answers. With consciousness, however, we are still in a terrible muddle. Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused. And, as with all the earlier mysteries, there are many who insist - and hope - that there will never be a demystification of consciousness. Mysteries are exciting, after all, part of what makes life fun. No one appreciates the spoilsport who reveals whodunit to the moviegoers waiting in line. Once the cat is out of the bag, you can never regain the state of delicious mystification that once enthralled you. So let the reader beware. If I succeed in my attempt to explain consciousness, those who read on will trade mystery for the rudiments of scientific knowledge of consciousness, not a fair trade for some tastes. Since some people view demystification as a desecration, I expect them to view this book at the outset as an act of intellectual vandalism, an assault on the last sanctuary of humankind. I would like to change their minds.
Daniel Dennett
Both aristocracy and democracy are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable. But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death.
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
Well, for instance, why does everything always have to be written from the point of view of a human being? Why not write from the point of view of a cat? Or a tree?
Austin Scott Collins (Crass Casualty (The Victoria da Vinci novels) (Volume 2))
Regarding politics: You've got your cats on one side and your dogs on the other. Someone has to walk the fence and feed the animals. —Kinky Friedman
Ray Palla (SIMPLE TRIPLE STANDARD)
... life wasn't full of problems, it was rich with decisions.
Shirley Rousseau Murphy (Cat Seeing Double (Joe Grey, #8))
The interest some folk take in the oddities of philosophers would be much tickled by McTaggart. He had an odd appearance – a large head and a shuffling sideways walk – and he rode a tricycle around Cambridge and was scrupulous about greeting cats whenever he saw them.
A.C. Grayling (The History of Philosophy)