top of page
.png){kind=small}
Philosophy Quotes
"You can never know everything. Part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of knowledge lies in going on anyway."
41
"Rules are where there is a lack. They are to make up the deficiency, explicit or implicit. The system of existence, being complete in itself, is in no need to follow any of them. The appearance of disorder---or even order, in contrast---is when we observe something as a detached entity. Taken as a whole, the Universe is absolute, nothing being lacking, insignificant, or improvable. So, any such thing as a Theory of Everything (TOE) is a mere chimera."
41
"If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?"
41
"I can never feel that the Illusion of Life is a truth as long as any illusion reflects unreality; however, even an untruth is a truth in its turn."
41
"To fate and the strange way that it twists us all together."
41
"A monster that refused, sometimes, to behave like a monster. When a monster stopped behaving like a monster, did it stop being a monster? Did it become something else?"
41
"All people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it."
41
"They comedifferent and the samewith each it is different and the samewith each the absence of love is differentwith each the absence of love is the same."
41
"My philosophy? Simplicity plus variety."
41
"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."
41
"Your destiny - by hook or crook, by this way or that, at some corner or nook - will catch up with you."
41
"Letting go meant you accepted what couldn't be changed. You didn't try to hold on to hope in order to coerce a change in fortune...nor did you battle against superior forces of fate and try to make them capitulate to your will...nor did you beg for salvation because you assumed you knew better. Letting go meant you stared at what was before you with clear eyes, recognizing that unfettered choice was the exception and destiny the rule."
41
"Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a 'first generation' of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet."
41
"Control is an illusion, as is restraint. Dark to light, light to darkness."
41
"When is it too right but too wrong to be right?"
41
"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."
41
"Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective."
41
"As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty."
41
"If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others could never harm us."
41
"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."
41
"(On the seeming futility of metaphysics) Why then has nature afflicted our reason with the restless striving for such a path, as if it were one of reason's most important occupations? Still more, how little cause have we to place trust in our reason if in one of the most important parts of our desire for knowledge it does not merely forsake us but even entices us with delusions and in the end betrays us! Or if the path has merely eluded us so far, what indications may we use that might lead us to hope that in renewed attempts we will be luckier than those who have gone before us?"
41
"Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself."
41
"All I want is' - and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame - 'to retain my freedom.'I should myself have thought,' said Jacques, 'that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one's responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your view."
41
"He was letting you break your icons one by one. he was letting you reduce him to the status of a human being."
41
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
41
"It's too late to change the world, but, hopefully it's not too late to change ourselves."
41
"We don't live as God intended us to, but we live as the Devil wants us to."
41
"Reason with most people means their own opinions."
41
"Just because something isn't good doesn't mean it's bad."
41
"Would it not therefore be wiser in moral concerns to acquiesce in the judgement of common reason, or at most only to call in philosophy for the purpose of rendering the system of morals more complete and intelligible, and its rules more convenient for use (especially for disputation), but not so as to draw off the common understanding from its happy simplicity, or to bring it by means of philosophy into a new path of inquiry and instruction?"
41
"Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.As if I were not puzzled at myself!"
41
"Why is man the being who won in the world of emptiness, dethroning all animal species? For he is closest to the perfection of emptiness."
41
"Fuck rational thought."
41
"No ideology can help to create a new worldor a new mind or a new human being --because ideological orientation itselfis the root cause of all the conflicts and all the miseries.Thought creates boundaries, thought creates divisions and thought creates prejudices; thought itself cannot bridge them. That's why all ideologies fail.Now man must learn to live without ideologiesreligious, political or otherwise. When the mind is not tethered to any ideology, it is free to move to new understandings. And in that freedom flowers all that is good and all that is beautiful."
41
"It's one of the great fallacies, it seems to me," said Lee, "that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.""And memory.""Yes, memory. Without that, time would be unarmed against us."
41
"There is no God and we are his prophets."
41
"Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking-that the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action-that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise-that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality-that the alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind-that the acceptance of a mystical invention is a wish for the annihilation of existence and, properly, annihilates one's consciousness."
41
"...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion."
41
"All life is rife with possibilities. Seeds have possibilities, but all their tomorrows are caught by the patterning of their life cycle. Animals have possibilities that are greater than that of a fir tree or a blade of grass. Still, though, for most animals, the pattern of instinct, the patterns of their lives, are very strong. Humanity has a far greater range of possibilities, especially the very young. Who will children grow up to be? Who will they marry, what will they believe, what will they create? Creation is a very powerful seed of possibility."
41
"Yet the higher a man climbs the further he has to fall."
41
"Yes, the world is an illusion. But Truth is always being shown there."
41
"The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; as it was not they that engendered those beliefs, so they are powerless to destroy them."
41
"An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."
41
"Misunderstanding is generally simpler than true understanding, and hence has more potential for popularity."
41
"Prayer by itself is like a diet without protein! Prayer is important to our spiritual growth- but of even greater importance is God's Word, the Bible."
41
"Spirituality is the poetry of our experience. Science is the gauge of our reality. Together, they create the essence of our humanity."
41
"Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains [heaven]. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed."
41
"...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain."
41
bottom of page