Quotes About Philosophy

Most of us see ourselves as corks floating in a stream … [T]his is yet another frozen view. According to this … , everything … changes except the cork. While we generally admit to changes in our body, our mind, our thoughts, our feelings, our understandings, and our beliefs, we still believe 'I' myself don't change. I'm still me. … an unchanging cork in an ever-changing stream. This is precisely what we believe the self to be – something that doesn't change.

It's in our very trying to define and arrange things for ourselves – trying to identify and assign meaning to things – that we end up creating a world that is ultimately meaningless.

In fixing] on the idea of a universe full of separate, unchanging, persistent things … [w]e also necessarily conceive that each thing must die, must one day come to an end. … [W]hen that thing is the imagined 'I', this prospect naturally terrifies us.

Always...no wait...never.....

If you're studying geology, which is all facts, as soon as you get out of school you forget it all, but philosophy you remember just enough to screw you up for the rest of your life.

Everything was dragging me toward the arts; even the study of modern philosophy suggested that philosophy was nonsense.

might try for a doctorate in philosophy and become a teacher, as teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

ART VS. COMMERCE he artist stood back to view the geometric precision of his latest creation. Beautiful, he murmured, but will it sell? No time to examine the philosophic implications. Customers, buzzing with excitement, hovered near the piece. He wrapped up a deal quickly. This is business, the spider said with a vicious smile. It ain't art.

It is based on a pragmatic philosophy of science called functional contextualism

The wooing, the winning, the dining, the romance—it's all part of his here-and-now philosophy. He doesn't feel reluctant about sharing intimacies with a stranger because he isn't thinking of anything beyond selling himself.

What does Karl Marx put on his pasta? Communist Manipesto!

Among college students, economics and philosophy majors have similar current incomes, but it's the economics students who drive cars, because it's the economics students who expect to have jobs someday.

Logic matters. It leads us from simple ideas to surprising conclusions.

IDEAS TRICKLE OUT OF SCIENCE, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into the less predictable eddies of art and philosophy.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during

Ideas trickle out of science, into the flow of commerce, where they drift into less protectable eddies of art and philosophy.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the overman: He is this lightning; he is this frenzy. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

As Montesquieu wrote, "If triangles had a god they would give him three sides.") For

A great principle of moral advancement, on par with Love thy neighbor and All men are created equal, is the one on the bumper sticker: Shit happens.

Around 500 BCE, in what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, several widely separated cultures pivoted from systems of ritual and sacrifice that merely warded off misfortune to systems of philosophical and religious belief that promoted selflessness and promised spiritual transcendence.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.

Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative.