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Philosophy Quotes
"About no subject is there less philosophizing than about philosophy."
39
"Schelling's God is the totality of Nature struggling towards consciousness, and Man is as far as the struggle has got, with the animals not too far behind, vegetables somewhat lagging, and rocks nowhere as yet. Do we believe this? Does it matter? Think of it as a poem or a painting. Art doesn't have to be true like a theorem. It can be true in other ways. This truth says there is a meaning to it all, and Man is where the meaning begins to show."
39
"We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first."
39
"Dying is easy. Living is hard."
39
"It is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures, and civilizations -- past and present -- are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams, and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millenia."
39
"Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself."
39
"Life is a journey with almost limitless possibilities."
39
"I have never thought, for my part, that man's freedom consists in his being able to do whatever he wills, but that he should not, by any human power, be forced to do what is against his will."
39
"Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life."
39
"To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it."
39
"If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation."
39
"Self-manipulation is our medication. Mythology is our drug. The only cure is honesty."
39
"At night all cats are grey."
39
"This poem was meant to be unwritten. But I am writing it now and have thereby changed destiny."
39
"One spiritual writer has observed that human beings are born with two diseases: life, from which we die; and hope, which says the first disease is not terminal. Hope is built into the structure of our personalities, into the depths of our unconscious; it plagues us to the very moment of our death. The critical question is whether hope is self - deception, the ultimate cruelty of a cruel and tricky universe, or whether it is just possibly the imprint of reality."
39
"Internal and external world is interdependent. Your experiences and impressions of the outside world shape your thoughts and imagination, while making the choice and decisions, from your internal thought process, creates your physical reality."
39
"Blind-believers and staunch atheists have the same god - namely, a self-deluded, one's own shadow's bot."
39
"You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering."
39
"The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution."
39
"I don't know what humor is."
39
"Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."
39
"If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?"
39
"Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name."
39
"Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist."
39
"Bush invited his constituency to be blind to the world's real problems, and leftists often do the opposite, gazing so fixedly at those problems that they cannot see beyond them. Thus it is that the world often seems divided between false hope and gratuitous despair. Despair demands less of us, it's more predictable, and in a sad way safer. Authentic hope requires clarity--seeing the troubles in this world--and imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable."
39
"There is many a virtuous woman weary of her trade."
39
"Dreams of innocence are just that, they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris."
39
"Peace, Love, and Happiness, are the priceless treasures of life."
39
"The laws of gravity work everywhere except in the heart and the soul."
39
"You can't hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree."
39
"Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt."
39
"Adharmenaidhate tabat, tato bhadrani pashyati, tatah sapatnan jayati, - samulastu vinashyati. In unrightousness they prosper, in it they find their good, through it they defeat their enemies, - but they perish at the root."
39
"The petty man is eager to make boasts, yet desires that others should believe in him. He enthusiastically engages in deception, yet wants others to have affection for him. He conducts himself like an animal, yet wants others to think well of him."
39
"But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning."
39
"Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples."
38
"The first step towards philosophy is incredulity."
38
"The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic."
38
"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness."
38
"Roddick has good presence on the court and has so much adrenalin."
38
"Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy."
38
"We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions."
38
"What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate."
38
"The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion."
38
"You know, the whole philosophy of ad hoc combinations has its strengths and its weaknesses."
38
"No-one loves another More than he loves whatever another within may haveThat is part of one's self."
38
"The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English languagethose words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul."
38
"He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant."
38
"A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages."
38
"Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective."
38
"Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco."
38
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