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Philosophy Quotes
"What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone."
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"The great proof of madness is the disproportion of one's designs to one's means."
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"In the void, there is no distinction of east and west."Gwen blinked slightly at that. "I know all of those words, and yet when strung together like that I have no idea what they mean."
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"Without doubt, it is a delightful harmony when doing and saying go together."
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"All interpretation or observation of reality is necessarily fiction. In this case, the problem is that man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other purpose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species. It is impossible to survive in a prolonged state of reality, at least for a human being. We spend a good part of our lives dreaming, especially when we're awake. As I said, pure biology."
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"No one was normal, not really."
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"I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest - a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low. I live in calm, looking to the end."
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"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."
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"Even the least of our activities ought to have some end in view."
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"Everything in life is nonsense. It's just a question of perspective."
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"Right time, right place, right moment."
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"If you accept that you can die at any time - then you might not be as ambitious as you are."
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"It is Vitaraag vignan [the Spiritual Science of the Enlightened Ones] to look at gain, and to see losses is the knowledge of worldly wanderings."
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"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim."
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"Those who realize their folly are not true fools."
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"As we drove, I imagined we were standing still and the world was coming toward us."
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"People quick to criticize others, but won't shine the light on themselves. You can't always judge a book by the outside appearance. You have to open it up and read in order to discover how precious it is."
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"There is no map of the soul because we make it up as we go..."
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"Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment."
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"Man is made to adore and to obey: but if you will not command him, if you give him nothing to worship, he will fashion his own divinities, and find a chieftain in his own passions."
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"The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."
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"We don't live as God intended us to, but we live as the Devil wants us to."
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"As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods."
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"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."
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"The past, present, and future, were all equally in gloom."
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"How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do."
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"Where does fiction end and reality begin?"
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"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space."
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"With regard to sleep and waking, we must consider what they are: whether they are peculiar to soul or to body, or common to both; and if common, to what part of soul or body the appertain: further, from what cause it arises that they are atributes of animals, and whether all animals share in them both, or some partake of the one only, others of the other only, or some partake of neither and some of both."
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"I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure."
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"Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity."
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"That which endures forever, it is released from nebulous name-giving."
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"Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, " read Dwayne. "Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable."
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"The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful, the best occupations are the least forced."
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"I have patience in all things " as far as the antechamber."
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"And further, observing that all this indeterminate substance is in motion, and that no true predication can be made of that which changes, they supposed that it is impossible to make any true statement about that which is in all ways and entirely changeable. For it was from this supposition that there blossomed forth the most extreme view of those which we have mentioned, that of the professed followers of Heraclitus, and such as Cratylus held, who ended by thinking that one need not say anything, and only moved his finger; and who criticized Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once."
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"One of the real tests of Christian character is to be found in the lives we live from day to day."
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"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."
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"People of the world, today always say, "Look up to the sky, look up to the sky", but while they do that, they trample on butterflies with broken wings and they step on ladybugs with broken legs. "Look up to the sky and be like God", they say; but nay, it is the nature of the mortal to cast his gaze upward, while it is the nature of the gods in the sky to cast their gaze downwards. When you are below, the way to look is up. When you are up, the way to look is down."
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"Looters become looted, while time and tide make us mercenaries all."
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"You may GIVE UP in self-denial but you GIVE"IN in denial of self."
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"Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?"
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"At night all cats are grey."
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"That speaking the words, even if true, had little power to change the inevitable or even make him feel much better."
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"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."
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"The existence of relative truth does not prove the non-existence of universal truth."
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"There never was a good war or a bad peace."
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"In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world."
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