Quotes About Philosophy

Hannah Arendt

The point then is not that there is a lack of public admiration for poetry and philosophy in the modern world, but that such admiration does not constitute a space in which things are saved from destruction by time. The futility of public admiration, which daily is consumed in ever greater quantities, on the contrary, is such that monetary reward, one of the most futile things there is, can become more "objective" and more real.

Quaestio Mihi Factus Sum" ("I am become a question to myself")

Ninguna filosofía, análisis o aforismo, por profundo que sea, puede compararse en intensidad y riqueza de significado con una historia bien narrada.

There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.

This book has been written against a background of both reckless optimism and reckless despair. It holds that Progress and Doom are two sides of the same medal; that both are articles of superstition, not of faith. It

Nothing we see or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given to the senses. Hegel was right when he pointed out that "the This of sense . . . cannot be reached by language"8 Was it not precisely the discovery of a discrepancy between words, the medium in which we think, and the world of appearances, the medium in which we live, that led to philosophy and metaphysics in the first place?

from the human viewpoint 'sub specie aeternitatis' always means also 'sub specie mortis

Menselijke wezens zijn per definitie verdacht, op grond van hun vermogen om te denken, en deze verdenking kan niet afgewend worden door voorbeeldig gedrag, want het menselijk vermogen om te denken is ook het vermogen om zich te bedenken.[...]De volgende beslissende stap is [...] de moord op de morele persoon in de mens. Dit gebeurt hoofdzakelijk door het martelaarschap onmogelijk te maken.

This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.

Philosophy suffered more from modernity than any other field of human endeavor.

Not only does the actual meaning of every event always transcend any number of past causes which we may assign to it, this past itself comes into being only with the event itself.

It is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger's approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence.

Nothing expressed in words can ever attain to the immobility of an object of contemplation. Compared to the latter, meaning, which can be said and spoken about, is slippery; if the philosopher wants to see and grasp it, it slips away.

As Tony Judt wrote a few years ago in The New York Review of Books,8 Arendt made many small errors for which her critics will never forgive her. But she got many of the big things right and for this she deserves to be remembered.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

Death shows man that he is nothing if man does not understand himself as a part of the whole. By showing man his nothingness, however, death also points out both his source and a possible escape from nothingness—from death.

who actually believe that men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can think;

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.

What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears

Can life be said to exist at all?

Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding.

We have no immortal souls; we have no future life; we are just like the green sea-weed, which, once cut down, can never revive again! Men, on the other hand, have a soul which lives for ever, lives after the body has become dust; it rises through the clear air, up to the shining stars!