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Philosophy Quotes
"Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars."
3
"In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them."
3
"If after all men cannot always make history have a meaning they can always act so that their own lives have one."
3
"To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher."
3
"Man is not a being who stands still."
3
"I fall asleep with the sound of rain, I wake up with the songs of the wind."
3
"Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before."
3
"Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth."
3
"What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope; you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair. Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life."
3
"Find a victory in every defeat to remain hopeful and find a defeat in every victory to remain humble."
3
"I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man."
3
"Many have been the wise speeches of fools though not so many as the foolish speeches of wise men."
3
"Our magazine covers frequently feature the immoral, the perverted, the psychologically sick. Sin is “in.” People don't like to be told they are sinners."
3
"It's love that makes the world go round - otherwise it would be flat."
3
"Amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think."
3
"Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science."
3
"But there is something about Time. The sun rises and sets. The stars swing slowly across the sky and fade. Clouds fill with rain and snow, empty themselves, and fill again. The moon is born, and dies, and is reborn. Around millions of clocks swing hour hands, and minute hands, and second hands. Around goes the continual circle of the notes of the scale. Around goes the circle of night and day, the circle of weeks forever revolving, and of months, and of years."
3
"If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."
3
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
3
"Every beginning has an end and every end has a new beginning, don't worry, broken soul, life will one day come to an end."
3
"Man has been reared by his errors: first he never saw himself other than imperfectly, second he attributed to himself imaginary qualities, third he felt himself in a false order of rank with animal and nature, fourth he continually invented new tables of values and for a time took each of them to be eternal and unconditional...If one deducts the effect of these four errors, one has also deducted away humanity, humaneness, and 'human dignity'."
3
"Affliction may be for our edification and Christian development."
3
"To truly hate is an art one learns with time."
3
"It is almost as if we are all playing a big game of hide-and-go-seek. We all hide expecting to be found, but no one has been labelled the seeker. We stand behind the wall, at first excited, then worried, then bored, then anxious, then angry. We hide and hide. After a while, the game is not fun anymore. Where is my seeker? Where is the person who is supposed to come find me here in my protected shell and cut me open? Where is that one who will make me trust him, make me comfortable, make me feel whole? Some people rot on the spot, waiting for the seeker that never comes. The most important truth that I can relate to you, if you are hiding and waiting, is that the seeker is you and the world, behind so many walls, awaits."
3
"Control is an illusion, as is restraint. Dark to light, light to darkness."
3
"That sort of half sigh, which, accompanied by two or three slight nods of the head, is pity's small change in general society."
3
"The fact is you cannot be intelligent merely by choosing your opinions. The intelligent man is not the man who holds such-and-such views but the man who has sound reasons for what he believes and yet does not believe it dogmatically. And opinions held for sound reasons have less emotional unity than the opinions of dogmatists because reason is non-party, favouring now one side and now another. That is what people find so unpleasant about it."
3
"The society we have described can never grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands."
3
"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."
3
"To sense which gifts to accept & which to leave behind is our path to discovering freedom."
3
"Life starts from a white hole and ends in a black hole."
3
"All thinking men are atheists."
3
"And so the Universe ended."
3
"What give all that is tragic, whatever its form, the characteristic of the sublime, is the first inkling of the knowledge that the world and life can give no satisfaction, and are not worth our investment in them. The tragic spirit consists in this. Accordingly it leads to resignation."
3
"I define my journey, I enjoy it too."
3
"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."
3
"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us."
3
"I've come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call "The Physics of The Quest" - a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum. And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this: "If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared " most of all " to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself... then truth will not be withheld from you." Or so I've come to believe."
3
"In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. 'I don't want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don't see what use he is."
3
"This just makes me know and understand that there is no one reality that suits all, just one that suits each of us."
3
"Sensual and spiritual are not easy words to use; that there are, perhaps, not twoAphrodites, but one Aphrodite with a Janus face."
3
"Death is not a trip, but a destination."
3
"No matter how big a hen's hut is, it must bow to enter."
3
"Some mysteries are meant to stay that way."
3
"Just think! This whole world of ours is only a speck of mildew sprung up on a tiny planet, yet we think we can have something great - thoughts,, actions! They are all but grains of sand."
3
"Children respect discipline. They want to be guided. It gives them a sense of belonging, a sense of security."
3
"Unless the soul is fed and exercised daily, it becomes weak and shriveled. It remains discontented, confused, restless."
3
"When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed."
3
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