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Philosophy Quotes
"Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers."
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"I see the cultural messaging everywhere that says an ordinary life is a meaningless life. . . . I know the yearning to believe that what I'm doing matters and how easy it is to confuse that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate."
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"To be, or not to be: that is the question. That's from Hamlet's - maybe Shakespeare's - most famous soliloquy. But what if Shakespeare - and Hamlet - were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?"
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"Beauty Is In The Mind of The Beholder."
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"God respects me when I work but loves me when I sing."
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"Thou shalt not search with desire; because the real treasures, they, will remain forever hidden from you."
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"I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so."
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"When I stay in one Place, I can hardly think at all; my body had to be on the move to set my mind going." Jean-Jacques Rousseau."
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"He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must."
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"When one thing becomes TRUE for you the PARADOX becomes a BLIND SPOT!"
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"It's love that makes the world go round - otherwise it would be flat."
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"However much we guard against it we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us."
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"And I or you pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth."
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"Life has got to be lived-that's all that there is to it."
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"People are wonderful one at a time. Each one of them has an entire hologram of the universe somewhere within them."
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"The only certainty in life is that it is uncertain."
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"To truly hate is an art one learns with time."
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"The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful he must obey his impulse."
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"This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope."
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"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty."
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"He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass."
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"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
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"Circumstance points to deeper meaning."
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"As my father always used to tell me, 'You see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you.' And I always used to think, 'So?"
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"Death is not the worst thing; rather, when one who craves death cannot attain even that wish."
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"To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light."
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"Things alter for the worse spontaneously if they be not altered for the better designedly."
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"Time is not something to be killed. Doing so suffocates a part of us, writing off part of our life that could, or rather should, be spent doing something meaningful."
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"It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones."
44
"Relativism poses as humble by saying: "We are not smart enough to know what the truth is-or if there is any universal truth. It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It's like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master-or if I even have a master. The result is that I don't have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride."
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"We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious."
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"I've known humans, and I know beasts. The beast is better. It is unpretentious. It kills for food. Humans do 'cause they're just not any good."
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"Where does fiction end and reality begin?"
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"Time for the world to end."
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"Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?"
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"Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is."
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"David: And you think it can just evaporate? Even if at one time they loved one another?Marx: That's one of the sad truths of existence. Nothing in this world is permanent. Even the characters created by the great Shakespeare will, in millions of years, cease to exist-when the universe runs its course and the lights go out."
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"New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one."
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"Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage."
44
"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."
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"What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements."
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"All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal."
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"Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact."
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"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."
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"Had no need of a guide to learn ignorance."
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"It's almost dawn. You can feel it coming. The world holds its breath, because there's really no guarantee that the sun will rise. That there was a yesterday doesn't mean there will be a tomorrow."
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"The flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side."
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"The whole humanity together must start working on focusing on reinforcing the elements of love and compassion from Islamic philosophy into the general human psyche."
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"Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural."
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"A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them."
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