Ontology Quotes

“Wrongly do the Greeks suppose that there is a coming into being and a passing away; for nothing comes into being or passes away, but there is a mingling and a separation of things that are.”

“Mathematics is the ontology of our time.”

“For from what does not exist, it is impossible for anything to come into being, and it is impossible and unheard of for what exists to be destroyed.”

“The world is not a mere sum of things.”

“To be is to be good.”

“Thus it must be absolutely, or not at all.”

“That which is absolutely nothing can have no affections.”

“It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.”

“It is in virtue of unity that beings are beings.”

“We have to abandon the idea that the world is a gigantic machine. It's not a machine. It's a set of processes.”

“It seems to be part of our concept of a substance that it has its origin essentially.”

“To be is to be the value of a variable.”

“Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory.”

“Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being.”

“We live in a world of social constructions, but that doesn't mean they're not real.”

“No entity without identity.”

“The central subject-matter of descriptive metaphysics is the category of material bodies and the category of persons.”

“The world is all that is the case.”

“God is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.”

“For it is the same thing to think and to be.”