Quotes About Philosophy

wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: "The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one's own home.

I opened it the way we used to open Hafez, closing our eyes, asking our question and letting our finger rest somewhere at random. It opened to the page in the middle of Burt Norton,' beginning with the lines At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor/fleshless./ Neither from not toward; at the still point,there the dance/is.

What choice does the king have but to kick the poets and storytellers out of his republic? And what choice does the poet have but to destabilize the philosopher king's power by speaking the truth?

Everyone has gone postmodern. They can't even read the text in the original—they're so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says.

Perhaps there is nothing to be understood, perhaps understanding is simply not to be found, is not applicable to such a thing. But it is hard, hard, not to try to understand, even for me, who accepts that all is nothing, that sense does not exist.

I'm an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the Enlightenment, and reason, and logic, and you know, facts.

It's what passes for wisdom, being ironic and cynical.

In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.

As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.

A thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.

mundo del pensamiento positivo, los demás no están ahí para que los cuidemos, ni para darnos baños de realidad que no les hemos pedido. Solo tienen sentido si nos animan, nos aplauden y nos reafirman. Y aunque esto suena de lo más despiadado, hay mucha gente normal que adopta esta filosofía a modo de credo

Other people can be annoying, as Sartre famously suggested, but true hell is perpetual imprisonment in the self.

Scholarship, religion, philosophy—they were killing matters in those days, and at that time I was still close enough to my human habits of thought to be concerned about the outcome of the invasion. And too, it was still respectable among scholars to be a warrior, and among warriors to be a scholar, which it is no longer, as I'm sure you know.

Pitiful, puling, like all your kin the slave of time that rots the body before the mind has seen more than a single flower in all the meadows of the Cosmos.

Awareness is everything. Hallie once pointed out to me that people worry a lot more about the eternity *after* their deaths than the eternity that happened before they were born. But it's the same amount of infinity, rolling out in all directions from where we stand.

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all my parts.

So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all of my parts.

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.

she believed material desires were toxic.

Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out. The idea though is to be moving up the ladder, not down, like the McCobbs were.

There is no stepping in the same river twice. So say the Greek philosophers, and the crocodiles make sure.

being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn't especially minded that.