Quotes About Philosophy

For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however tenacious." —ALBERT EINSTEIN

Often I wonder to what extent a mortal's love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I'll never quite understand.

On questions relating to the human condition, no single metaphor has all the answers.

The Truth lies not in the Yes and not in the No, but in the knowledge and the beginning from which the Yes and the No arise.

The cry of revolt against such a god [a god which just affirms the world as it is] is nearer the truth than is the sophistry with which men attempt to justify him....

The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

Truth and reality split apart.

Reason is the inextinguishable impulse to philosophize with whose destruction reason itself is destroyed.

Existenz only becomes clear through reason; reason only has content through Existenz.

To philosophize is to learn to die – philosophizing is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being. "Philosophy and Science", World Review Magazine (March 1950).

An aphorism never coincides with the truth: it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time writing essays.

An aphorism is never exactly true. It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half.

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Wer Meinungen von sich gibt, darf sich auf Widersprüchen nicht ertappen lassen. Wer Gedanken hat, denkt auch zwischen den Widersprüchen.

Der Aphorismus deckt sich nie mit der Wahrheit; er ist entweder eine halbe Wahrheit oder anderthalb.

Religion is the opium of the masses.

Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.