Quotes About Philosophy

I am looking for the novelists whose writing is an extension of their intellect rather than an extension of their neurosis.

To practice a religion can be lovely, to believe in one is almost always disastrous.

Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.

I am what I it. It is what is is.

omphaloskepsis

It's meaning that is of no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning--or the lack of it--in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning.

no matter how valid, how vital, one's belief system might be, one undermines that system and ultimately negates it when one gets rigid and dogmatic in one's adherence to it.

If time eats the doughnut, does love eat the hole?

Time, in his view, was a short, sloppy path from Eve's crayon box to the Messiah's fire box.

In the world according to the positivist, the inspiring thing about scrambled eggs is that anyway you turn them they are sunny side up. In the world according to the existentialist, the hopeless thing about scrambled eggs is that anyway you turn them they are scrambled.

Muddy Waters he play in the river Joan Rivers she play in the mud Swami guru play in a big salad bowl Counting lettuce and chewing his cud

What is the 'direction' of the Earth in its journey; where are the atoms 'going' when they spin?

Cartersian doubt (deliberate suspension of all interpretations of experience that are not absolutely certain)

It is not a heart: light, heavy, kind or broken; dear, hard, bleeding or transplanted; it is not a heart.

There were no musicians or dancers, for Plato believed that educated men ought to be capable of entertaining themselves by speaking and listening in turns in an orderly manner.

Drinks have had a closer connection to the flow of history than is generally acknowledged, and a greater influence on its course. Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

As Socrates so philosophically put it, since we don't know what death is, it is illogical to fear it.

Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God.

You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!