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Philosophy Quotes
"I desire the world - therefore I have it."
39
"The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain."
38
"Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death."
38
"Opposities are married."
38
"Right time, right place, right moment."
38
"I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards."
38
"I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgealbe would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body."
38
"The cause of all trouble, the root of all sorrow, the dread of every man lies in this one small word-sin. It has crippled the nature of man . . .It has caused man to be caught in the devil's trap."
37
"Long before man traveled into space, rabbis debated how one would observe Shabbat there-not because they anticipated space travel but because Buddhists strive to live with questions and Jews would rather die."
37
"My first world is humanity. My second world is humanism. And, I live in the third world being merely a human."
36
"It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think yours is the only path."
36
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
36
"This is not the end, this is not even the beginning of the end, this is just perhaps the end of the beginning."
35
"It is neither right nor safe to go against my conscience."
35
"Modern man thinks he loses something - time - when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains, except kill it."
35
"Man alone measures time.Man alone chimes the hour.And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures.A fear of time running out."
35
"The key point about life is that in the end nothing really matters."
35
"The most ridiculous activity of human mind is questioning. Cognition of reality surpasses both question and answer, however ingenious."
35
"I don't know what's wrong with this world, but I do know what's right with it: Love. I have studied enough history to see that no matter how cruel the behavior of tyrants and no matter how dark the moments have been, Love has always prevailed. Always."
35
"I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists."
35
"In normal everyday usage, "I" embodies the primordial error, a misperception of who you are, an illusory sense of identity. This is the ego. The illusory sense of self is what Albert Einstein, who had deep insights not only into the reality of space an time, but also into human nature, referred to as "an optical illusion of consciousness."
34
"Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers."
34
"The demarcation between a positive and a negative desire or action is not whether it gives you a immediate feeling of satisfaction but whether it ultimately results in positive or negative consequences."
34
"God's will is for us to commit our lives to Christ and follow Him. God's will also is that we avoid sin."
34
"What is suffering? I'm not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans - small and large, crude and multifaceted - that concern us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at."
34
"The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation."
34
"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."
34
"If Jesus had not risen from the dead, no right-minded person would have glorified anything so hideous and repulsive as a cross stained with the blood of Jesus . . .An unopened grave would never have opened heaven."
34
"Maybe it's not logical. I don't know. I don't care. I've been asked didnt I think it odd that I should be present to witness the death of everything and I do think it's odd but that doesnt mean it's not so. Someone has to be here."
34
"Pride consists not in wanting to be rich, but in wanting to be richer than your neighbor. It is not in wanting to be noticed but in wanting to be the most noticed. It is not in wanting to have things but in wanting more things than others."
34
"Being on the fringes of the world is not the best place for someone who intends to re-create it: here again, to go beyond the given, one must be deeply rooted in it. Personal accomplishments are almost impossible in human categories collectively kept in an inferior situation."
33
"Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."
33
"The present is a transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by it's efficacy with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing , one may dispose of it as he pleases."
33
"Ego is the complete identification with form. Physical forms, thought forms, emotional forms."
33
"If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?"
33
"As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us."
33
"This you may say of man - when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back."
33
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and long.They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."
33
"The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love. Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it."
33
"Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance."
33
"No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don't ask, walk!"
32
"Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension."
32
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large I contain multitudes)."
32
"My philosophy is to make things that are important and to do them right."
32
"When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him."
32
"Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."
32
"Philosophy is one reason which could lead to death."
32
"Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver."
32
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