Quotes About Philosophy

To be sure, nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.

Who believes today that war can be abolished? No one, not even pacifists.

Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, 'Alice, Alice, what is the answer?' Her companion replied, 'There is no answer.' Gertrude Stein continued, 'Well, then, what is the question?' and fell back dead.

an expression of human consciousness, consciousness seeking to know itself.

What we call nihilism (now) I simply call thought. What thinking doesn't lead to nihilism? (pg. 440)

Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)

For two thousand years, among Christians and Jews, it has been spiritually fashionable to be in pain.

it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering—more precisely, the spiritual merits and benefits of suffering.

La más antigua experiencia del arte tiene que haberlo percibido como encantamiento o magia; el arte era un instrumento del ritual (las pinturas de las cuevas de Lascaux, Altamira, Niaux, La Pasiega, etcétera). La primera teoría del arte, la de los filósofos griegos, proponía que el arte era mímesis, imitación de la realidad.

Nobody who really thinks about history can take politics altogether seriously.

You're becoming more and more deeply in debt to yourself, and you are already bankrupt. You look at yourself too much. That's the beginning of all absurdity. Look about you. The world is an interesting place.

Ninguno de nosotros podrá recuperar jamás aquella inocencia anterior a toda teoría, cuando el arte no se veía obligado a justificarse

Animal? Ao pensar nesse termo sentiu um leve embaraço. Era um animal, Luisito? Ou era algo diferente? O que era afinal um animal? No desdém do uso comum, as pessoas esqueciam-se muito facilmente da essência dessa palavra. Anima , o termo latina para alma. Sim, o animal era alguém que possuía alma. Por outro lado, não estava muito certa de que se pudesse dizer a mesma coisa da maior parte dos seres humanos. In Um companheiro inesquecível, página 34

People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else.' Laurence Arne-Sayles, interview in The Secret Garden, May 1976

He did not feel as if he were inside a Pillar of Darkness in the middle of Yorkshire; he felt more as if the rest of the world had fallen away and he and Strange were left alone upon a solitary island or promontory. The idea distressed him a great deal less than one might have supposed. He had never much cared for the world and he bore its loss philosophically.

There was no one there. Which is to say there was someone there. Miss Wintertowne lay upon the bed, but it would have puzzled philosophy to say now whether she were someone or no one at all.

When you internalize an author whose vision or philosophy is both rich and out of fashion, you gain a certain immunity from the pressures of the contemporary. The modern world, with it's fads, propaganda, and advertising, is forever trying to herd us into conformity. Great literature can help us to remain fad-proof.

The passage was underlined. It simply said: "What is it, Catullus? Why do you not make haste to die?" FOURTEEN

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do.

Why do philosophers in the South so often end as newspapermen, poets as doctors? Maybe they crave what's found in pain and loss: a sense of living among other human beings. They'll give up dreams for that.

Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.