Quotes About Philosophy

Think it over carefully. This is very important, I say, because to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. Do you follow? When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.

Was it Aristotle who said the human soul is composed of reason, will, and desire?" "No, that was Plato. Aristotle and Plato were as different as Mel Tormé and Bing Crosby. In any case, things were a lot simpler in the old days," Komatsu said. "Wouldn't it be fun to imagine reason, will, and desire engaged in a fierce debate around a table?

I'm always tripped up by the eternal who am I?

Nature is actually unnatural

Tobacco's a killer," Kafuku said. "Being alive is a killer, if you think about it," Misaki said.

I stare at this ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from now. In a hundred years everybody here-me included-will have disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust. A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal, like a gust of wind could blow it all away.

Writing things was important, wasn't it? Nakata asked. 'Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.

In order to pin down reality as realilty, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the maintenance of this chain which produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.

Good question, but no answer. Good questions never have answers.

Properly speaking, should any individual ever have exact, clear knowledge of his own core consciousness? I wouldn't know, I said. Nor would we, said the scientists.

Humans are immortal in their thought. Though strictly speakin', not immortal, but endlessly, asymptotically close to immortal. That's eternal life.

Date etiquette lesson number two: Don't die. Go on living.

If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule.

Somerset Maugham once wrote that in each shave lies a philosophy. I couldn't agree more. No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes contemplative, even meditative act.

I believe that it's not necessary to believe in the soul's existence. But turn that around and you come to the belief that there's no need to not believe in its existence.

Turning all this over in my mind, I started to imagine another me somewhere, sitting in a bar, nursing a whiskey, without a care in the world. The more I thought about it, the more that other me became the real me, making this me here not real at all.

Death exists--in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a billiard table--and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

Ascribing meaning to life is a piece of cake compared to actually living it. -from Hear the Wind Sing

When people pass away, do their thoughts just vanish?

Each way of thinking has its own shape and color, which wax and wane like the moon.

Nothingness means there's absolutely nothing, so maybe there's no need to understand it or imagine it.

Maybe time is nothing at all like a straight line. Perhaps it's shaped like a twisted doughnut. But for tens of thousands of years, people have probably been seeing time as a straight line that continues on forever. And that's the concept they based their actions on. And until now they haven't found anything inconvenient or contradictory about it. So as an experiential model, it's probably correct.

If you don't believe in the world, and if there is no love in it, then everything is phony. No matter which world we are talking about, no matter what kind of world we are talking about, the line separating fact from hypothesis is practically invisible to the eye. It can only be seen with the inner eye, the eye of the mind.

Are there any capitalist cats? Nakata asked