Quotes About Philosophy

And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.

Another day where nothing has happened, he thought. That was a good thing, he reminded himself. What was the Chinese curse? May you live in interesting times.

Jackson had never really seen the point of existential angst. If you didn't like something you changed it and if you couldn't change it you sucked it up and soldiered on, one foot after the other. ("Remind me not to come to you for therapy," Julia said.)

Maths was the one true thing, according to Nancy. Not love? Teddy said. Oh, love, of course, Nancy said, in an offhanded way. Love is crucial, but it's an abstract and numbers are absolute. Numbers can't be manipulated. An unsatisfactory answer, surely, Teddy thought. It seemed to him that love should be the absolute, trumping everything. Did it? For him?

Please, with the God talk. Hate to break it to you, but there is no God.

The theological systems of men and schools of men are determined always by the character of their ideal of Christ, the central fact of the Christian system.

Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God.

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.

If there were a people consisting of gods, they would be governed democratically. So perfect a government is not suitable to men.

L'homme est une passion inutile. Man is a useless passion.

Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene and only afterwards, defines himself

The thought of being nothing after death is a burden insupportable to a virtuous man.

There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.

Man is a substance clad in shadows.

The wise man of Miletus thus declared the first of things is water

A poor spirit is poorer than a poor purse. A very few pounds a year would ease a man of the scandal of avarice.

Hunting is not a proper employment for a thinking man.

A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry or animal behaviour.

The world is a philosophical prison and Man is the philosophical prisoner.

For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.

A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his income.

Suppose that men kill thee, cut thee in pieces, curse thee, what can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, just?

No man can be brave who thinks pain the greatest evil; nor temperate, who considers pleasure the highest good.