Quotes About Philosophy

Hell is not a place. It's not a noun, child. It's a verb.

Being an imperfect creature in an imperfect world he would always know paradox. And that was why in paradox there was always a kind of truth. That was why philosophers and soothsayers flourished. In a perfect world there would be no place for them. In an imperfect world the mysteries were always without solution and that was why there was always a great choice of solutions.

Life's not easy, it is a hard task to live it well and with grace—but, by Hades, let's not complicate it with deities and water-nymphs!

You Mabden seem to think that happiness must be bought with misery... It is not easy for Vadhagh to understand that. We believe -- believed -- that happiness was a natural condition of reasoning beings.

We are friends to Death, but not His servants.

The nearest we ever come to knowing truth is when we are witness to a paradox.

Life is tough, then you die. The sooner you accept that and move on with your life, the better off you'll be.

A so-called ideal scheme which does not grow out of reality is definitely and finally not ideal at all.

We have art,' Nietzsche said, 'so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

I don't think clarity is necessarily truth. It's simplicity, isn't it?

as if Morphy had invented a great philosophical profundity on his way to the opera. That happens, of course, when you are not looking at yourself too carefully.

We have art, Nietzsche says, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Sartre puts it, value arises simply from our choices. What we choose, we value simply because we have chosen it (and apparently we remain scot-free at any moment to nonvalue it by simply un-choosing it). In other words, we do not choose (in his view) because we see the value of something. We see the value of something because we have chosen it.

Polanyi writes that there exists unspecifiable and unarticulated knowledge among scientists that is not susceptible to language and usually is dismissed in philosophy of science.

the damage done by the specification of particulars may be irremediable. Meticulous detailing may obscure beyond recall a subject like history, literature, or philosophy. Speaking more generally, the belief that, since particulars are more tangible, their knowledge offers a true conception of things is fundamentally mistaken.

we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse. (quoting Joel Salatin)

On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. "If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night," Richards offered by way of an analogy, "you wouldn't look for her in the TV set." The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

The philosophical implications of predictive coding are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories.

Mysticism," he likes to say, "is the antidote to fundamentalism.

Alone among the animals, we humans insist that our food be not only "good to eat"—tasty, safe, and nutritious—but also, in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, "good to think," for among all the many other things we eat, we also eat ideas.

The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.

Can a recognition of one's shallowness qualify as a profound insight?

The usual antonym for the word "spiritual" is "material." That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I'm inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for "spiritual" might be "egotistical.

How can we be certain, he was suggesting, that our experience of consciousness is "authentic"? The answer is we can't;