Quotes About Philosophy

HANNAH: Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric, they used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

I learned three things in Zurich during the war. I wrote them down. Firstly, you're either a revolutionary or you're not, and if you're not you might as well be an artist as anything else. Secondly, if you can't be an artist, you might as well be a revolutionary... I forget the third thing.

If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?

SEPTIMUS: When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. THOMASINA: Then we will dance. Is this a waltz?

Guildenstern: What's the first thing you remember? Rosencrantz: [thinks] No, it's no good. It was a long time ago. Guildenstern: No, you don't take my meaning. What's the first thing you remember after all the things you've forgotten? Rosencrantz: Oh, I see... I've forgotten the question.

Thomasina: Septimus, what is carnal embrace? Septimus: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one's arms around a side of beef.

Mind reedetakse igal sammul. Ma ei usu inimesse, ja sina tahad, et ma usuksin jumalasse.

That's it then, is it? What was it all about? When did it begin?

I renounce all love except pure philosophical love. The so-called love of human animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls.

Philosophy consists in moderating each life so that many lives will fit together with as much liberty and justice as will keep them together: and not so much as will make them fly apart, when the harm will be the greater.

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia

After Magritte often serves as a companion piece to The Real Inspector Hound, which I think is appropriate in at least one way: neither play is about anything grander than itself. A

Do you think death could possibly be a boat? No, no, no...death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. I've frequently not been on boats. No, no no - what you've been is not on boats.

Don't let Bernard get to you. It's only performance art, you know. Rhetoric. They used to teach it in ancient times, like PT. It's not about being right, they had philosophy for that. Rhetoric was their chat show. Bernard's indignation is a sort of aerobics for when he gets on television.

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure.

They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate.

No, and if it's not your brain thinking cold, cold thoughts, which you can dress in any kind of mood, then it's nothing. It has to be a cold, cold thought. I mean cold, or cool at least. Your brain. That's all there is.

No creían que la muerte fuese un accidente: la vida tal vez lo fuera, pero la muerte era deliberada.

La peur du lendemain est une plaisanterie comparée a celle de la veille. Et le destin n'est rien qu'un peu de passé en retard.

Wittgenstein once said: the mystery is, why does the universe exist at all?

Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans.

Elio Vittorini observed in 1957 that ever since Napoleon, France had proved impermeable to any foreign influence except German philosophy: and that was still true two decades later... By the time German philosophy had passed through Parisian social thought into English cultural criticism, its difficult vocabulary had achieved a level of expressive opacity that proved irresistible to a new generation of students.

in an Apparently Godless Era.

Whether capitalist economies thrive best under conditions of freedom is perhaps more of an open question than we like to think.