Quotes About Philosophy

Nebulat ergo cogito.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and altars like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn

So you truly do not believe in God? I find no reason to, in nature... If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention.

The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place?" —Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, London, Routledge

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself.

You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another; you cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple.

After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?

Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.

there is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy, a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History, and, even, with the European tradition.

U.Eco habla de la época greco-latina]: No es que no hayan existido mujeres que filosofaran. Es que los filósofos han preferido olvidarlas, tal vez después de haberse apropiado de sus ideas /[U. Eco is talking about the Greco-Latin era]; It is not that there had not been women philosophers. It is that male philosophers have preferred to forget them, perhaps after having appropriated their ideas.

But it was the newspapers that called John XXIII the Good Pope, and the people followed suit." "That's right. Newspapers teach people how to think," Simei said. "But do newspapers follow trends or create trends?" "They do both, Signorina Fresia. People don't know what the trends are, so we tell them, then they know. But let's not get too involved in philosophy—we're professionals. Carry on, Colonna.

And you," I said with childish impertinence, "never commit errors?" "Often," he answered. "But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.

Por que Deus é o ser perfeitíssimo? Porque, se fosse imperfeitíssimo, seria meu primo Gustavo.

religion is or has sometimes been the opium of the people, more often than not it has been its cocaine.

Um Humanwissenschaften zu betreiben, genügt es nicht, Kriminalromane zu lesen, als ob sie Parmenides wären, man muß auch Parmenides lesen, als ob er ein Kriminalroman wäre.

All I know about the Jews is what my grandfather taught me. They are the most godless people, he used to say. They start off from the idea that good must happen here, not beyond the grave. Therefore, they work only for the conquest of this world.

If there is something paradoxical, in the sense of curious or bizarre, it is that the word paradox has two fairly different meanings: one which is used in logic and philosophy, and the other in rhetoric.

he would learn—truth is brief (afterward, it is all commentary). So

you must not worry if they do not yet exist, because that does not mean they will not exist later. And I say to you that God wishes them to be, and certainly they already are in His mind, even if my friend from Occam denies that ideas exist in such a way; and I do not say this because we can determine the divine nature but precisely because we cannot set any limit to it.

The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.

omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum

Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously three old owls on a chest of drawers were screwing the daughter of the doctor. But then the mother called them, colorless green ideas slepp furiously.