The aim of the meditations is a complete reforming of philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation. That implies for descartes a corresponding reformation of all the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-self sufficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is philosophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can they develop into genuine sciences.
The For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself; it is like a hole of being at the heart of Being.
All time exists. That is the truth. If the future did not exist now, how could we journey toward it? If the past does not exist still, how could we leave it behind?
Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.
What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts, indeed, sometimes from no facts, in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.
Do all the work you can; that is the whole philosophy of the good way of life.
The ascetic morality is a negative morality. And strictly, what is important for a man is not to die, whether he sins or not.
Metaphysics has as the proper object of its enquiries three ideas only: God, freedom, and immortality.
Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed! There is no being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned his back os truth when he turned towards his museum of specific ideals.
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions, they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.