Quotes About Philosophy

French philosopher Henri Bergson called élan vital. Like all species, we have a will to live and a strong desire to cling to and protect our life and to defend ourselves from danger. But we have to be cautious not to let our instinct of self-preservation and auto-defense mislead us into thinking we have a separate self.

The meditation on interdependence is to help one penetrate reality in order to be one with it, not to become caught up in philosophical opinion or meditation methods. The raft is used to cross the river. It isn't to be carried around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn't the moon itself.

Although there may be ten thousand different forms of the Buddhist teachings, the different schools and different systems are merely different faces of the one reality.

If we go deeply into theology, the same is true of God. It is an error to say: "God is," and it is also an error to say: "God is not." "Is" and "is not" are ideas that come from our mind, and cannot be applied to the wonderful, absolute truth.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus said, "You can never bathe in the same river twice.

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

Das allerdings ist ein absurder Gedanke. Andererseits sind, wie ich im Laufe meines Lebens jetzt schon mit Entschiedenheit weiß, gerade die absurden Gedanken die klarsten Gedanken und die absurdesten die wichtigsten überhaupt.

Our libraries are so to speak prisons where we've locked up our intellectual giants, naturally Kant has been put in solitary confinement, like Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, like Pascal, like Voltaire, like Montaigne, all the real giants have been put in solitary confinement, all the others in mass confinement, but everyone for ever and ever, my friend, for all time and unto eternity, that's the truth.

It is not necessary to read all of Goethe or all of Kant, it is not necessary to read all of Schopenhauer; a few pages of Werther, a few pages of Elective Affinities and we know more in the end about the two books than if we had read them from beginning to end, which would anyway deprive us of the purest enjoyment.

All this time I've been talking about the human sciences and don't even know what these human sciences are, don't have the slightest clue, he said, I thought, been talking about philosophy and don't have a clue about philosophy, been talking about existence and don't have a clue about it, he said. Our starting point is always that we don't know anything about anything and don't even have a clue about it, he said

The question is not: Can I write about Wittgenstein. The question is: Can I be Wittgenstein for one moment without destroying either Wittgenstein or myself… Wittgenstein is a summons to which I cannot respond... Thus, I do not write about Wittgenstein not because I can't write about him, but rather because I cannot answer him.

Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.

Wenn Man an den Tod denkt, alles ist lächerlich. (When one thinks of death, everything is ridiculous).

Everything about everybody is nothing but diversion from death.

Las palabras echan a perder lo que se piensa, el papel ridiculiza lo que se piensa.

Die Großväter sind die Lehrer, die eigentlichen Philosophen jedes Menschen, sie reißen immer den Vorhang auf, den die andern fortwährend zuziehen.

literature is not conceivable without philosophy or the other way round

But of course the world consists only of absurd ideas.

Being unable to make people more reasonable, I preferred to be happy away from them. VOLTAIRE

Hayat tasavvurunun yüce sanat? gibi yaÅŸaman?n ve var olman?n daha yüce sanat?n?n da alaya al?nd???, kabare gibi bir dünyada ya??yoruz biz. Felsefe kabare gibi. Din kabare gibi. SavaÅŸ, devasa bir ceset y???n?, sayg?deÄŸer beyefendi, bütünüyle yalan bir k?ta, bugün tüm bunlar ÅŸaka.

One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all.

Io non ho mai avuto un padre e non ho mai avuto una madre, ma ho avuto sempre il mio Montaigne.

I enter into a book and settle in it, neck and crop, you should realize, in one or two pages of a philosophical essay as if I were entering a landscape, a piece of nature, a state organism, a detail of the earth, if you like, in order to penetrate into it entirely and not just with half my strength or half-heartedly, in order to explore it and then, having explored it with all the thoroughness at my disposal, drawing conclusions as to the whole.

For the thinking person there is no such thing as idleness... By contrast, one might say that the thinking person is at his most active when he is supposedly doing nothing. This is beyond the comprehension of genuinely idle people