Quotes About Philosophy

In cio', ci allineiamo, non si sa quanto consapevoli, a un'idea di fondo, squisitamente barbara, che in teoria non condividiamo, ma in realta' pratichiamo senza nessuna difficolta': il senso delle cose non alberga in un loro tratto originario e autentico, ma nella traccia che da esse sprigiona quando entrano in connessione con altri pezzi di mondo.

And I resented you for that," she went on, "because I've always believed hate is such an unworthy emotion. So weak and ultimately pointless." I marveled briefly at how innocent a life someone would have to have led for such a philosophy to emerge credible and intact, and for a second I loved her for it.

mono no aware, the sadness of being human

The months and days are the travelers of eternity. —Bash?

Shoganai," I said. Literally, There is no way of doing it. "Yes," he said, nodding. "Elsewhere they have Cest la vie, or That's life.

I read Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self's buy-in for behavior it would never otherwise agree to.

God. That bastard, he doesn't exist. —Samuel Beckett

It was a long time ago." "I don't think something like that can ever be a long time ago. It's not how time works.

Barry Eisler

I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that's the way things are. Things end. That's mono no aware.

Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward. —Kierkegaard

When I'd killed Ozawa at the sent?, I'd briefly wondered whether I was now one of the bad guys. By the time I did McGraw, I'd figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise r?nin, I decided, than a naïve samurai.

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is... We are all overbrained and overemotioned.

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

the world is ever so slightly but uncorrectably out of focus, that there are no absolutely precise answers. Whatever

In other words, that humans were not set apart by having "a soul.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Practical wisdom, Aristotle told us, is the combination of moral will and moral skill.

NOVELIST AND EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER ALBERT CAMUS POSED the question, "Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?" His point was that everything in life is choice.

Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and this display our character.

Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good...

To function efficiently - to function at all - we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statement of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavor and lawful profit. And we have maps.

Philosophers talked a lot about how people should act toward one another, as members of a family, in relationships with friends and neighbors, as citizens of a city. Good behavior was part of being a worthwhile human being and a responsible citizen. But it generally was not a part of religious activities.

Plato, too, had emphasized a kind of dualism of shadow and reality, matter and spirit.