Quotes About Philosophy

Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.

This effort has turned Lawrence the engineer into Lawrence the philosopher. There was a time, when I was a child, when the whole world seemed alive and knowing, he wrote in Organic Gar­dening and Farming. Trees were friends and as George Eliot put it: ,'Flowers see us and know what we're thinking about. ' Then came a time when plants just grew, silently and without emotion. But today, I'm entering a second childhood, as least as far as plants are concerned.

It is of interest that from the seventeenth century the word 'vicious' was used to describe a fault in logic, when a conclusion was realized by false means of reasoning. Webster's third definition of the vicious circle cites this fault in logic: 'an argument which is invalid because its conclusion rests upon a premise which itself depends on the conclusion.

There is an ethics of perception. Theories are not simply forms of perception. When practised they become ethical decisions.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.

Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.

There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.

If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does.

Your least favorite virtue, or nominee for the most overrated one? Faith. Closely followed—in view of the overall shortage of time—by patience.

In one way, I suppose, I have been in denial for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.

I sympathize afresh with the mighty Voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed and urged to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies.

I don't have a body, I am a body.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Saul Bellow: Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.

Trotsky was so much an intellectual that in the final analysis, Marxism was not quite enough for him.

There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses

I am so made that I cannot believe.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are.

At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astonomy takes the place of astrology.