Quotes About Philosophy

Biographical Notes II. Evil and Redemption III. The Question of Baptism IV. Faith and Philosophy V. The Church, Mystical and Social VI. Syncretism and Catholicity

Foreword I. Biographical Notes II. Evil and Redemption III. The Question of Baptism IV. Faith and Philosophy

Incredulity is the wisdom of the fool

Good nonsense is good sense in disguise.

I thought of the words of the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

Like true philosophers I've come to believe that religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown after proper education.

Woody Allen had it right: "Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering—and it's all over much too soon.

I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.

While a fixation on results is certainly unhealthy, short-term goals can be useful developmental tools if they are balanced within a nurturing long-term philosophy.

Philosophy suffers, so suffers History. Psychology, invariably. Russian suffers and History does too, a cosmic Russian suffering. But the worst of it's in the sciences with their laboratory needs. The sciences aren't just expensive, they're greedy. They run their departments as if another war's on.

But I would submit that even messianism, even false messianism, is more Jewish a discipline than history

Among mankind's greatest faults is his a) kindness, b) generosity, c) fortitude, d) contentment, e) vanity. That was debatable. But the Pythagorean theorem was not, and if the civilian Uri was one side and the soldier Uri was the other, the true him was the hypotenuse, slanted opposite, the squared sum of both.

The tendency is always strong to believe that whatever receives a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. John Stuart Mill, 1869

It is only when we are blinded by a narrow conceptual view of the world that life can seem meaningless.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn't the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God—no small things—but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them.

In the meantime, nothing sufficed, nothing was equal to the question, Why am I here?

Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing through a conductor, it was a part of the natural world, to be studied, understood, and, when possible, managed.

He concluded his speech by citing an old parable, of an Eastern monarch who charged his wise men to invent a sentence that would apply to all times and in all situations. The wise men returned with "And this too shall pass away.

Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.

It is propitious and gratifying that Fordham University Press has decided to reissue these two volumes of The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce. When first published, in 1969, reviewers and commentators were taken with both the sweep and the depth of Royce's thought.

It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.

What else would anyone want to know? Personality: Tense. Is that past or present tense? It's perpetual tense.

One of the great secrets of life is learning to live without being happy.

One of the greatest secrets of life is learning to live without being happy.