Quotes About Philosophy

The Apology of Socrates was Plato's account of the legal defense that Socrates made at his trial in Athens. The speech itself is one of the great classics of ancient literature. They executed him anyway.

Pascal's Wager says that given the choice, even if the odds for success are slim, it is better for her to take the risk: there is nothing for her to lose and a lot for her to gain.

On the Nature of Things

there is nothing objectively that makes objectivity objectively true)

Stoics believed that Logos—reason—was a divine element that infused all of existence

propositional statements

In Platonic thinking, there is a sharp divide between spiritual realities and this world of matter.

Philo of Alexandria

Moreover, as the mind is to the body, so the Logos is to the world.

Death shows that the summum bonum of life is to continue living it.

Wisdom is referred to as "she"—or even as "Lady Wisdom"—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine);

ancient religions were almost never interested in "true beliefs.

There was a scant role for ethics in the paganism. It is not that ancient people were less ethical than people today; it is that ethics had little to do with religion. If it had a "location" in ancient life, it was in philosophy.

a seven-letter Latin abbreviation that was as widely used in antiquity as "R.I.P." ("Rest in Peace," itself from the Latin requiescat in pace) has been in the modern world. The abbreviation is "n.f. f. n.s. n.c." Translated, it provides a most trenchant summary of the materialist views endorsed and promoted by Epicurus, Lucretius, and their followers: non fui, fui, non sum, non curo—"I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.

Today we are familiar with the funereal abbreviation "RIP" ("Rest in Peace"). Ancient Romans had something comparable, a seven-letter abbreviation that spoke volumes: "I was not; I was; I am not; I care not." The meaning is clear. There was no existence before birth. A person existed only after being born. After death there once more was no existence.

Oh! Moeten wij eeuwig lijden of altijd vluchten voor wat mooi is?

Instinct's the iron skeleton under all our ideas of free will.

I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don't know what those things are.

you wondered why in the hell the world had been created in the first place. Good things were in short supply, and so much of the rest was downright rancid.

I think tempus est umbra in mente is a better one. Roughly translated, it means time is a shadow in the mind.

Because—dig it—when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?

tempus est umbra in mente

That's all I can tell you. once you get into cosmological shit like this, you got to throw away the instruction manual.

Goddam life, I say, if you can't laugh you might as well laugh anyway. That's my goddam attitude, and I'll stick by it; this ain't a sad world unless you're sane