Quotes About Philosophy

I was born to be nothing and to have nothing.

La gente no suele saber aplicar la filosofía. Dudo de que ni siquiera los filósofos sepan hacerlo. —La gente puede usar conceptos morales lo mismo que tú has usado ahora el concepto de la verdad para convencerme. Cualquiera puede hacerlo. —Quizá. Pero creo que la filosofía moral es algo que resulta desesperanzadamente personal. No puede ser comunicado. «Si un león hablase, no podríamos comprenderlo», ha dicho Wittgenstein.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

I've not often been happy or thought it was in my stars.

Perhaps in the end the suffering is all, it's all contained in the suffering. The final atoms of it all are simply pain.

I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.

What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.

I don't think she's had much of a life. Well, a life is a life. What does that mean? One never knows. I daresay most lives are rotten. It's only when one's young one expects otherwise.

Who is one's first love? Who indeed.

And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.

I ceased some time ago to believe in goodness.

And could it be true without other awful things being true as well?

Is your father writing a book? said Alison. No. He's existing. Some people live, like the rest of us, like the people in your plays. He just exists.

But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.

I'd like to to know what it is he's after, I mean, is it an experience or a thought, is it something you'd put in a book, or die for, or die of?

Yes, I am free, she said to herself, but it's not like ordinary freedom, it's being in hell, a brilliant lucid hell.

Suffering is no scandal. It is natural. Nature appoints it. All creation suffers. It suffers from having been created, if from nothing else. It suffers from being divided from God.

I have lived for nearly ninety years and I know nothing.

If you want to eat spaghetti you must use your teeth.' Wittgenstein. I don't think Wittgenstein really said any of those things you say he said!

Do you really believe that? That it's wicked to love destiny? Yes. What happens is usually what oughtn't to happen. Why love it?

In a way it does not matter where I am. In another way where I am is fated.

Wittgenstein has created a void into which neo-Kantianism, existentialism, utilitarianism have made haste to enter.

But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.

Death contradicts ownership and self.