Quotes About Philosophy

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting. But I would also say that I'm interested in getting myself to believe that it's going to happen to me. I'm interested in it, because if you're not, you're nuts. It's really de facto what we're here to find out about.

Why were we put here, so inclined to love, when end of our story = death? That harsh. That cruel. Do not like.

Neatness was not one of the things he aimed at in life.

What the jogger's face shows is not boredom but contemplation, which Thomas Aquinas described as man's highest activity save one—contemplation plus putting the fruits of that contemplation into action.

Only a sense of humor can help each of us face those great unanswerable questions: Why was I born? Why am I here? Why must I die? What must I do to make my life a triumph? —

Man has emerged from dust of stars to contemplate the universe around him.

I am, therefore I write.

I recognize that I may be wrong. This makes me insecure. My sense of insecurity keeps me alert, always ready to correct my errors. I do this on two levels. On the abstract level, I have turned the belief in my own fallibility into the cornerstone of an elaborate philosophy.

We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that one cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take therefore the form of distinction for the form.

after Spinoza, philosophers know that they are using language to clarify language, like cutters using diamonds to shape other diamonds. Language is seen no longer as a road to demonstrable truth, but as a spiral or gallery of mirrors bringing the intellect back to its point of departure.

The agenda of the roadblock is the philosophy of the stop sign.

In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy.

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".

Philosophy ... finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.

Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.

In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.

Rather than the obsession with impurity, you'd do better to fear the nostalgia for purity.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

I have too much respect for the idea of God to make it responsible for such an absurd world.

Question your tea spoons.

If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted.