Quotes About Philosophy

I speak in cosmological terms because it seems to me that is the only possible way to think if one is truly alive. I think this way also because it is just the opposite of the way I thought a few years back when I had what is called hopes. Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions.

So, whether the world is going to pieces or not, whether you are on the side of the angels or the devil himself, take life for what it is, have fun, spread joy and confusion.

people who work themselves to the bone and when they produce young they preach to the young the gospel of work - which is nothing, at bottom, but the doctrine of inertia.

Why do lovely faces haunt us so? Do extraordinary flowers have evil roots?

Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless.

Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is—the afflictions of Job.

Life has to be given a meaning, because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Nothing is right or wrong but thinking makes it so. You no longer believe in reality but in thinking. And when you are pushed off the dead end your thoughts go with you and they are of no use to you.

When one spends what he has on himself, when one has a thoroughly good time with his own money, people are apt to say "he doesn't know what to do with his money." For my part, I don't see any better use to which one can put money. About such individuals one can't say that they're generous or stingy. They put money into circulation—that's the principal thing.

Confirmations, corroborations rather than disillusionment. At eighteen I was as much of a philosopher as I ever will be.

decidí dejarme llevar por la corriente, no oponer la menor resistencia al destino, como quiera que se presentase. Nada de lo que me había ocurrido hasta entonces había bastado para destruirme, nada había quedado destruido, salvo mis falsas ilusiones (...)

No existe una diferencia fundamental, inalterable entre las cosas: todo es flujo, todo es perecedero. La superficie de tu ser está desintegrándose constantemente; sin embargo, por dentro te vuelves duro como un diamante. Y quizá sea ese núcleo duro, magnético, dentro de ti lo que atrae a los otros hacia ti de buen o mal grado. Una cosa es segura: que cuando mueres y resucitas, perteneces a la tierra y lo que quiera que sea de la tierra es tuyo inalienablemente.

There is a world here as full and rich, as compelling and instructive, as Thoreau found at Walden.

Make me into any fantastic shape, use all your art, exhaust your lung-power - still I shall only be a thing fabricated, at the best a beautiful cultured soul.

To taste it once is to taste it forever --- life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes.

The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness.

Eu nu am fost niciodat? un ganditor.Ganditul nu te duce nic?ieri.E o am?gire.Ganditul te face morbid.

And so I think what miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet .

I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free.

What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but if so it was because I was indifferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything.

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as man.

Consideraba que la continuación de una existencia que no había pedido no iba a probar, verificar, añadir, ni substraer nada.

Life, said Emerson, consists in what a man is thinking all day.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, This is and no mistake.