Quotes from Walter Kaufmann

All of us have so much more time than we use well. How many hours in a life are spent in a way of which one might be proud, looking back?

The value of a human being, Nietzsche said, does not lie in his usefulness: for it would continue to exist even if there were nobody to whom he could be useful.

Commonly, people think of philosophy as a quest, however ill advised, for truth. John Dewey called it the quest for certainty. But it is more illuminating to say that, at its best, philosophy is the quest for honesty.

The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepen his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains.

Words signify man's refusal to accept the world as it is.

Those who believe in God because their experience of life and the facts of nature prove his existence must have led sheltered lives and closed their hearts to the voice of their brothers' blood.

Philosophy means liberation from the - routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish to fly.

It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.

Faith means intense usually confident belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.

Job's forthright indictment of the injustice of this world is surely right. The ways of the world are weird and much more unpredictable than either scientists or theologians generally make things look.

It does not follow that the meaning must be given from above; that life and suffering must come neatly labeled; that nothing is worth while if the world is not governed by a purpose.

It is widely assumed, contrary to fact, that theism necessarily involves the two assumptions which cannot be squared with the existence of so much suffering, and that therefore, per impossibile, they simply have to be squared with the existence of all this suffering, somehow.

Life ceases to be so oppressive: we are free to give our own lives meaning and purpose, free to redeem our suffering by making something of it.

The first function of a book review should be, I believe, to give some idea of the contents and character of the book.

Paul substituted faith in Christ for the Christlike life.

Here an attempt is made to explain suffering: the outcaste of traditional Hinduism is held to deserve his fetched fate; it is a punishment for the wrongs he did in a previous life.

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

The great artist is the man who most obviously succeeds in turning his pains to advantage, in letting suffering deepens his understanding and sensibility, in growing through his pains.

Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.

Use all the stars we have in stock; Of water, fire,walls of rock, And beasts and birds there is no lack. In our narrow house of boards, bestride The whole creation, far and wide; Move thoughtfully, but fast as well, From heaven through the world to hell

In our time equality is confused with conformity – as Nietzsche sees it– and it is taken to involve the renunciation of personal initiative and the demand for a general leveling. Men are losing the ambition to be equally excellent, which involves as the surest means the desire to excel one another in continued competition, and they are becoming resigned to being equally mediocre.

we others who thirst for reason want to look our experiences as straight in the eye as if they represented a scientific experiment

One can oppose the shallow optimism of so many Western thinkers and yet refuse to negate life.

The difference between great philosophers who disagree is perhaps less considerable than that which separates them from their followers. Members of philosophic schools or coteries live on what others have seen, and the disciple usually applies his master's insights with a confidence which, most of the time, the master lacked.