11 Most Important Philosophical Quotations (Part 2)

“We live in the best of all possible worlds.” – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 –
1716)

Voltaire’s famous novel Candide satirizes this optimistic view. And looking around you right now you
may wonder how anyone could actually believe it. But Leibniz [wiki] believed that before creation
God contemplated every possible way the universe could be and chose to create the one in which we
live because it’s the best.

The principle of sufficient reason holds that for everything, there must be sufficient reason why it
exists. And according to Leibniz the only sufficient reason for the world we live in is that God created it
as the best possible universe. God could have created a universe in which no one ever did wrong, in
which there was no human evil, but that would require humans to be deprived of the gift of free wills
and thus would not be the best possible world.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” G.W.F.
Hegel (1770 – 1831)

Similar to “vision is 20/20 in hindsight,” Hegel’s [wiki] poetic insight says that philosophers are
impotent. Only after the end of an age can philosophers realize what it was about. And by then it’s too
late to change things. It wasn’t until the time of Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) that the true nature of
the Enlightenment was understood, and Kant did nothing to change the Enlightenment; he just
consciously perpetuated it.

Marx (1818 – 1883) found Hegel’s apt description to be indicative of the problem with philosophy and
responded, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, what matters is
to change it.”

“Who is also aware of the tremendous risk involved in faith – when he

nevertheless makes the leap of faith – this [is] subjectivity … at its height.” –
Søren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)

n a memorable scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy deduced that the final step
across his treacherous path was a leap of faith. And so it is in Kierkegaard’s [wiki] theory of stages
of life.

The final stage, the religious stage, requires passionate, subjective belief rather than objective proof,
in the paradoxical and the absurd. So, what’s the absurd? That which Christianity asks us to accept as
true, that God became man born of a virgin, suffered, died and was resurrected.

Abraham was the ultimate “knight of faith” according to Kierkegaard. Without doubt there is no faith,
and so in a state of “fear and trembling” Abraham was willing to break the universal moral law against
murder by agreeing to kill his own son, Isaac. God rewarded Abraham’s faith by providing a ram in
place of Isaac for the sacrifice. Faith has its rewards, but it isn’t rational. It’s beyond reason. As Blaise
Pascal said, “The heart has its reason which reason does not know.”