Quotes About Philosophy

I want to live happily in a world I don't understand.

A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate.

Seneca and stoicism as a back door to explain why everything antifragile has to have more upside than downside

Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don't count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book

So just as Stoicism is the domestication, not the elimination, of emotions, so is the barbell a domestication, not the elimination, of uncertainty.

Academics are only useful when they try to be useless (say, as in mathematics and philosophy) and dangerous when they try to be useful.

I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.

If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.

What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.

To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher

As Ennius wrote, "The good is mostly in the absence of bad"; Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali.

I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house.

Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief.

Locke's definition of a madman: someone "reasoning correctly from erroneous premises.

Stoicism's Emotional Robustification Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

My best definition of a nerd: someone who asks you to explain an aphorism.

For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.

Mathematics is not just a numbers game, it is a way of thinking.

What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don't have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and

It happens that uncertainty, disorder, and the unknown are completely equivalent in their effect: antifragile systems benefit (to some degree) from, and the fragile is penalized by, almost all of them—even if you have to find them in separate buildings of the university campuses and some philosophaster who has never taken real risks in his life, or, worse, never had a life, would inform you that "they are clearly not the same thing.