Quotes About Philosophy

The main idea of personal happiness at that [Colonial] time was not some hedonistic notion of pleasure but the other, more philosophical, kind. The Greek philosophers believed that discovering one's own talents and then taking the pleasure of exploiting them (finding out that you had a singing voice, could write well, start a company, or invent new things), that was the deeper pleasure the founders had in mind and the freedom they sought.

Give a man a fish and you'll feed him for a day. Give him a religion and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.

I believed in a good home, in sane and sound living, in good food, good times, work, faith and hope. I have always believed in these things. It was with some amazement that I realized I was one of the few people in the world who really believed in these things without going around making a dull middle class philosophy out of it. I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.

There are worse things than being mad.

and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?

No matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

Nothing ever happened - Not even this

cliches are truisms and all truisms are true

Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall.

It's only through form that we can realize emptiness

do you think God made the world to amuse himself because he was bored? Because if so he would have to be mean.

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

because to me the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on (p. 153)

What does it mean that I am in this endless universe, thinking that I'm a man sitting under the stars on the terrace of the earth, but actually empty and awake throughout the emptiness and awakedness of everything? It means that I'm empty and awake, that I know I'm empty and awake, and that there's no difference between me and anything else.

because in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was The pathway to wisdom lies through excess

I nudged myself closer to the ledge and closed my eyes and thought 'Oh what a life this is, why do we have to be born in the first place, and only so we can have our poor gentle flesh laid out to such impossible horrors as huge mountains and rock and empty space,' and with horror I remembered the famous Zen saying, 'When you get to the top of a mountain, keep climbing.' The saying made my hair stand on end; it had been such cute poetry sitting on Alvah's straw mats.

and I realized no matter what you do it's bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.

Smith, I distrust any kind of Buddhism or any kinda philosophy or social system that puts down sex said Japhy (Gary Snyder)

wishing there was a Personal God in all this impersonal matter.

And this is not the happiness of a magazine writer who sends in his gay little philosophy of life to the editor for the one paragraph spread in front of the magazine: This is a serious happiness full of doubts and strengths. I wonder if happiness is possible. It is a state of mind, but I'd hate to be a bore all my life, if only because of those I love around me. Happiness can change into unhappiness just for the sake of change.

And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.

in one sense the drinker learns wisdom, in the words of Goethe or Blake or whichever it was The pathway to wisdom lies through excess (p. 113)

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel.