Quotes About Philosophy

let us learn to withstand it resolutely, and to fight it. And to start to rid it of its greatest advantage over us, let us take a completely different route from the usual one. Let us rid it of its strangeness, get to know it, become accustomed to it. Let us have nothing so often in our minds as death. Let us picture it in our imagination constantly, in all its aspects.

Il est peu d'hommes, qui aiment la poésie, qui ne se gratifieraient plus d'être le père de l'Éneide que du plus beau garçon de Rome, et qui ne souffriraient pas plus aisément la perte de celui-ci que de l'Éneide.

It is not certain where Death awaits us, so let us await it everywhere. To think of death beforehand is to think of our liberty. Whoever learns how to die has learned how not to be a slave. Knowing how to die frees us from all subjection and constraint.xi

I am not at all sure whether I would not much rather have given birth to one perfectly formed son by commerce with the Muses than by commerce with my wife.

jamás la filosofía me parece tan razonable como cuando combate y reconoce nuestra presunción y vanidad, cuando de buena fe confiesa la irresolución, debilidad e ignorancia humanas.

Wonder is the foundation of all... Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.

Je veux que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux.

I, who boast of embracing the pleasures of life so assiduously and so particularly, find in them, when I look at them thus minutely, virtually nothing but wind. But what of it? We are all wind.

There is no God.

It's higher consciousness that causes all our griefs and tortures, don't you think?

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness

Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.

Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.

It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by man's disappearance.

There can only be a true life as an other life, and it's from the point of view of this other life that the ordinary life of ordinary people will be made to appear as precisely other than the true. I live in an other way, and through the very alterity of my life, I show you that what you are looking for is elsewhere than where you are looking, that the road you are taking is an other road than the one you should be taking.

From a Christian point of view, human reason is madness compared to the reason of God, but divine reason appears as madness to human reason.

In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the interruption of events in favour of stable structures.

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.