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Philosophy Quotes
"Stay hungry. Stay foolish."
37
"The question I'm always asking myself is: are we masters or victims? Do we make history, or does history make us? Do we shape the world, or are we just shaped by it? The question of do we have agency in our lives or whether we are just passive victims of events is, I think, a great question, and one that I have always tried to ask."
37
"You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything."
37
"Alecto, do you think we have fallen from heaven, or do you think we are falling towards it?"
37
"Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time."
37
"It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought! Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery, we build where monsters used to hide themselves."
37
"Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability."
37
"Kill him? Would that be it? No man knew better than he the tricks that Destiny plays on a man, or how often the right man dies at the wrong time and place. A man never wore a gun without inviting trouble, he never stepped into a street and began the gunman's walk without the full knowledge that he might be a shade too slow, that some small thing might disturb him just long enough!"
37
"My city. I pondered that phrase, wondered why Barrons felt that way. He never said 'our world. He always said 'your world. But he called Dublin his city. Merely because he'd been in it so long? Or had Barrons, like me, been beguiled by her tawdry grace, fallen for her charm and colorful dualities?I looked around 'my bookstore. That was what I called it. Did we call the things of our heart our own, whether they were or not?"
37
"In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself."
37
"It is nevertheless better than the theological concept, of deriving morality from a divine, all-perfect will, not merely because we do not intuit this perfection, but can derive it solely from our concepts, of which morality is the foremost one, but because if we do not do this (which, if we did, would be a crude circle in explanation), the concept of his will that is left over to us, the attributes of the desire for glory and domination, bound up with frightful representations of power and vengeance, would have to make a foundation for a system of morals that is directly opposed to morality."
37
"The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present."
37
"I have no philosophy, my favourite thing is sitting in the studio."
37
"Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name."
37
"We fail so easily to see the difference between fear of the unknown and respect for the unknown, thinking that those who do not hasten in with bright lights and knives are deterred by a holy and superstitious fear. Respect for the unknown is the attitude of those who, instead of raping nature, woo her until she gives herself. But what she gives, even then, is not the cold clarity of the surface but the warm inwardness of the body - a mysteriousness which is not merely a negation, a blank absence of knowledge, but that positive substance which we call wonderfull."
37
"For nearly two centuries the popular spirit of each succeeding generation has tended more and more to the view that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the mind of man. Many modern novelists have been more concerned with the processes of consciousness than with the objective world outside the mind. In twentieth-century fiction it increasingly happens that a meaningless, absurd world impinges upon the sacred consciousness of author or character; author and character seldom now go out to explore and penetrate a world in which the sacred is reflected."
37
"Philosophy is an infertile hybrid. Life is a prolific hermaphrodite."
37
"The world is big in some ways, and so small in others."
37
"Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads."
37
"It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman."
37
"No one was normal, not really."
37
"Sometimes in life there's no problem and sometimes in there is no solution. In this space - between these apparent poles - life flows."
37
"Scripture indicates that deception, false religions, and apostasy lead to war, and that war in turn leads to famine and pestilence."
37
"I think I am, therefore, I am... I think."
37
"The boundary between good and evil are clearer for more common folks but gets blurred more and more as people get more power over their fellows."
37
"Each religion has provided a tremendous service in defining elements of conscience. They have made it possible for us to live together in a society, to work toward common goals, and to learn how to accept or tolerate relative opposition to our own opinions. I also think that this has been done much as a parent needs to provide a similar service for an adolescent. Internal and external conflict requires discipline to organize and structure some form of minimizing the chaos imposed on others."
37
"No matter how big a hen's hut is, it must bow to enter."
37
"So the question becomes, Daughter of the Dragon, what will you sacrifice? What will you let be taken away so that you, too, can have power?"
37
"The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor's badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully."
37
"This is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now, and probably also a Western European, is that there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like "Yeah, but, you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go do something else." and "Who cares?" and "It's all bullshit anyway."
37
"World's definition of successmaterial validation of selfcold and naked substitutefor inner warmth and beauty."
37
"Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be."
37
"What she liked was simply life. "That's what i did it for," she said, speaking aloud to life... Could any man understand what she meant, either, about life? But to go deeper, beneath what people said, and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary, they are. In her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? It was an offering, it was her gift."
37
"What do you do when you are faced with several different gods each claiming the same territory? The Babylonian Marduk and the Greek Zeus was each considered master of the sky and king of gods. You might also decide, since they had quite different attributes, that one of them was merely invented by the priests. But if one, why not both? And so it was that the great idea arose, the realization that there might be a way to know the world without the god hypothesis; that there might be principles, forces, laws of nature, through which the world could be understood without attributing the fall of every sparrow to the direct intervention of Zeus."
37
"Possible impossibility emerges From an impossible possibility, Or possibly, impossible possibility Blooms from the impossibly possible impossibility."
37
"It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,-that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field."
37
"Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?"
37
"Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being."
37
"She who is even once unjust can not complain if the like is expected of her again."
37
"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards?"
37
"It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers."
37
"The elixir for the vexed human spirit is quiet thinking and contemplation."
37
"Reality ground my expectations into microscopic particles."
37
"Time' is the illusional domain occupied by the state of boredom. 'Space' is the infinite - reality - experienced by the state of higher creative consciousness. Choose wisely."
37
"All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go."
37
"The problem in today's world is that people do not believe (lack trust) in goodness."
37
"Remember that “where God guides, He provides. Where He leads, He supplies all needs."
37
"Doubt: How can I know? Truth: How can you not?"
37
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