Quotes About Philosophy

If historical mysticism is, in the last instance, theological, then mysticism today, a mysticism of the unhuman, would have to be, in the last instance, climatological. It is a kind of mysticism that can only be expressed in the dust of this planet.

Leopardi: "True misanthropes are not found in isolation but among people, for it is practical experience in life, not philosophy, that makes us hate.

The last word of philosophy is loneliness.

Afraid to be content. Content to be sad.

But the truth is that I am a pessimist… except when writing about pessimism. I've managed to make pessimism a form of therapy.

Afraid to be happy. Content to be sad.

Consciousness is nothing more, he writes, than "a flash of lightning between two eternities of darkness.

We Philosophers. Eager to help, trained to be ineffectual.

The only philosophy worth pursuing is the one that poses questions without answers. Anything less is hubris. But this can never be proved – by definition.

An argument for or against suicide? One lives, in spite of life.

A philosopher – Shestov I think – once noted that, since philosophy deals with the most difficult and important issues concerning existence, philosophers think themselves the most important people. He then notes: "A bank clerk, who is always handing money out, might just as well consider himself a millionaire.

A saying from the Desert Fathers reads: "It is frightening to die, it is even more perilous to live a long life." If only pessimism had the devotion of the ascetics.

The problem with contemporary philosophy is that it begins in helplessness, when it should end with it. We lack even the most rudimentary theory of "giving up.

Voltaire once described optimism as "a cruel philosophy with a consoling name," which immediately suggests what pessimism might be: a consoling philosophy with a cruel name.

T]he devastating possibility that "wasting time" and "passing time" amount to the same thing.

One senses that for Schopenhauer, the world does exist, and it's horrible, and there's not much one can do about it.

the present book's inquiry into the elements of an adequate philosophy of consciousness leads to the conclusion that consciousness can be understood as the experience of performing structured combinations of intentional operations that relate the elements of experience to one another in intelligible patterns and that also relate the subjective or "tacit" dimension of consciousness to an objective dimension or pole.

The sum total of pain in the world is unlimited.

Eppure resta che qualcosa è accaduto, forse un niente che è tutto.

Sanity brings pain but madness is a vile thing.

Those who are held wise among men, and who search for the reason of things, are those who bring the most sorrow upon themselves

Money is the wise man's religion

Who knows but life be that which men call death,And death what men call life?

He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.