Quotes About Philosophy

Life, Vin said. You said that the only reason to create something was so that you could destroy it.

Lógicamente inconsistente. Obviamente incierto.

Of course, Wax thought, starting to climb, what am I but a pile of blood and meat that gets up and walks around?

The main objective is to learn to think crudely. Crude thinking is the great one's thinking.

As Marcus Aurelius taught us, "What stands in the way becomes the way.

Carl Jung argued that a paradox is one of our most valued spiritual possessions and a great witness to the truth.

Dissonance is disquieting because to hold two ideas that contradict each other is to flirt with absurdity, and, as Albert Camus observed, we are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.

What if all possible pain was only the grief of truth?

I only drink on two occasions—when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

I know it does not matter that I do not understand.

In philosophy, the opposite of truth is error; in Scripture, the opposite of truth is a lie.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

The Wheel of Life is painted on the outside walls of many Tibetan and Bhutanese monasteries in order to educate people in the basics of Buddhism. Yet it is not often found in Japan. In fact, Japanese Buddhists don't think or talk much at all about rebirth in the Six Realms. When they do talk about the afterlife, they tend to speak of becoming a Buddha, attaining Nirvana, or going to the Pure Land—expressions that they often use rather vaguely to mean roughly the same thing.

Tibetan Buddhists talk a lot about rebirth, both the rebirth of normal unenlightened people and that of enlightened beings such as the Dalai Lama, who is thought to be a reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. By contrast, Zen Buddhists rarely talk in detail or in literal terms about rebirth or reincarnation.

When Confucius was asked about death, he replied: "We do not yet understand life how could we possibly understand death?" Analogously, when asked questions about death, Zen masters are likely to turn the questioner's attention back to life.

In Zen, resolving the great matter of life and death requires facing up to mortality. In order to truly live, we have to come to terms with the termination of life as we know it.

The injunction to know oneself can be found in many traditions, including the Western philosophical tradition that goes back to Socrates. According to Zen, however, to truly discover what the self is, we need a more direct path than mere intellectual reasoning.

Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. —JORGE LUIS BORGES, "The Zahir

Zij geloofde aan een samenhang van alle verschijnselen, zonder echter een hogere macht aansprakelijk te stellen voor wat haar overkwam, zonder van een god persoonlijke bemoeienis met haar lot, troost, of loon naar werken te verwachten. Zij was er van overtuigd dat in de mens zelf de krachten ontstaan die men Goed en Kwaad noemt, en dat alleen door de ontwikkeling van het individuele bewustzijn de wil tot integriteit een menselijk gegeven wordt.

The more ideology becomes pacifistic, the more militaristic become the ideologists.

One does not escape the fate of Nietzsche's teaching so long as one recognizes strength only as strength and weakness only as weakness.

The soul suffers from nothing more than from not being understood. This is, though, its fate elicited by its own nature.

No me importaba el sentido de la vida. Lo único que quería era saber cómo vivir. Tal vez si uno descubría cómo vivir podría deducir de ahí el sentido de la vida