Quotes About Philosophy

I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." "Francisco

A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man's emotional responses and the essence of his character… a sense of life always retains a profoundly personal quality; it reflects a man's deepest values; it is experience by him as a sense of his own identity.

It's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence.

When all of Europe put into practice the ideas which he had preached, he came to live in America.

Enquanto pessoas como o senhor não descobrirem que o dinheiro é a origem de todo o bem, estarão caminhando para sua própria destruição.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not." stated by John Galt in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

Si identificáis vuestras creencias, hallaráis en ellas una triple condenación: hacia vosotros, hacia la vida y hacia la virtud, en la grotesca conclusión a que habéis llegado al creer que la moralidad es un mal necesario.

A sacrifice, it is necessary to remember, means the surrender of a higher value in favor of a lower value or of a nonvalue. If one gives up that which one does not value in order to obtain that which one does value—or if one gives up a lesser value in order to obtain a greater one—this is not a sacrifice, but a gain.

a man with an immense capacity for the enjoyment of existence.

Philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man's relationship to existence.

La fuerza y el espíritu son cosas opuestas; la moralidad acaba donde empieza a esgrimirse un arma.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics.

El propósito de la filosofía no es el de buscar el conocimiento, sino el de demostrar que dicho conocimiento es imposible para el hombre.

Ellsworth was fifteen, when he astonished the Bible-class teacher by an odd question. The teacher had been elaborating upon the text: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Ellsworth asked: "Then, in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?

Los defensores del alma humana estaban preocupados por los sentimientos de sus semejantes; los defensores del cuerpo tuvieron como solo objetivo el estómago, pero ambos se unieron para luchar contra la mente. Sin embargo, nadie, ni el más ruin de los seres humanos, puede renunciar totalmente a su cerebro.

I can say—not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots—that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world. | ~~Ayn Rand "Philosophy: Who Needs It, 10

There are no contradictions. When you think you found one. Check your premises.

Una moralidad que se atreva a deciros que obtendréis la felicidad en la renunciación a vuestra dicha, que valoréis aquélla por el fracaso de vuestros valores, es una insolente negación de la moralidad.

The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. The

God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit. A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.

If you have not yet heard it, my dear old-fashioned friends, it has now been proved that the rational is the insane.

don't you see that the essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

He was seeing a long line of men stretched through the centuries from Plato onward, whose heir and final product was an incompetent little professor with the appearance of a gigolo and the soul of a thug.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." ? Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged