Quotes About Philosophy

the success of relativistic quantum field theory offers no reason to believe that there is any such thing as a relativistic quantum field.

The old love of philosophy had returned. The process of thinking about philosophy always reminds me of fireworks. One question is shot up and bursts into a splendorous many. Answers? Forget answers. The spectacle is all in the questions.

One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense.

Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.

So comfortable would Plato feel seated at philosophy's seminar table that Alfred North Whitehead could famously write, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder                Thales sipped cheap wine                And in this did divine: "Why it's nothing at all but pure water!

The evolutionary argument for altruism could draw from [Victor] Frankl to argue that we need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival.

People die in this war, but the ideas cannot be erased.

Say there is no truth. Say there are only scraps that we feebly try to sew togethr.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

Time, I saw, was the fault of the universe, and because of it grief and expectation, equally mischievous, would prevent us having peace to watch the present.

Thought that is worth calling thought has no mercy on itself, that is the dreadful proof of its quality.

Reginald Hill

How can someone be wise who isn't even remotely happy?

Wir müssen uns Milarepa als glücklichen Menschen vorstellen, so wie Albert Camus uns Sisyphos beschreibt. Auch mein Weg, mein Optimismus, mein Humor, meine Lebensfreude sind zuallererst der Fähigkeit geschuldet, Sinn zu stiften. Sind doch Sinn und das Absurde untrennbar miteinander verwoben. Wie Leben und Tod auch.

Auch die Sinnfrage stellt sich mir nicht mehr. Weil ich loszulassen gelernt habe. Wer den Sinn immerzu sucht, weil er abhandengekommen ist, wird ihn ebenso wenig finden wie das Glück. Beide sind verwurzelt und flüchtig zugleich. In uns selbst.

Unser Wissen vom Leben beschränkt sich auf den Tod.

It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.

Intelligence is perhaps but a malady, -a beautiful malady; the oysters's pearl.

The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.

The truth is, clocks don't tell time. Time is measured in meaning.

God is, in other words, wholly Other: the Mysterium Tremendum, to borrow Rudolph Otto's famous phrase.

The Rationalists argued that God's attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation.

In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, "We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.