Quotes About Philosophy

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging for a chance to earn his bread.

so, then it must be that the thinkers will be forever subject to the men of brute force, and Plato's dream of a state ruled by philosophers will remain forever vain.

If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.

You know the old doctrine that the end justifies the means. I was reading some modern philosopher the other day and noted the statement that it is the means that determine the end.

What shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some other method of inducing men to behave themselves.

Today, girls,' said Miss Renshaw, 'we shall go out into the beautiful Gardens and think about death.

We have no means of understanding a fraction of the thought and science and philosophy and law that have gone to make that outside world. We simply accept it. We have grown up paying tribute to it, and that is all the most of us can do. We feel of the great world that it is simply there, something for the lucky ones to explore, and then only at the edges. It never occurs to us that we might make some contribution to it ourselves. And that is why we miss everything.

???? (hara hachi bun me, "belly eight parts [in ten] full")—an ancient Confucian precept

To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death.' Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1580)

In Sam's rough mountain-man philosophy those persons who became the wards of sadness and melancholy had never summoned for use and trial more than a part of what they had in them, and so had failed themselves and their Creator.

Nothing could be avoided, and nothing could be foreseen. What was the point of unnecessary fear?

He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.

When you think about new-born babies being killed in our own lifetime,' he said, 'all the efforts of culture seem worthless. What have people learned from all our Goethes and Bachs? To kill babies?

What does a woman who has lost her children care about a philosopher's definitions of good and evil? But what if life itself is evil?

Cuando el sentimiento de melancolía bovina, de irremediable fatalismo se transforma en un lacerante sentido del horror, el absurdo opio del optimismo acude en ayuda de los hombres.

The four cardinal points are three: South and North.

I've never known a tranquil atheist. Don't they always look like they just sat on a tack?

if Romeo had lived to see Juliet grow old and develop a slight moustache upon her upper lip—what then?

Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.

Bir insan?n ac? çekmesi, boÅŸ bir odadaki gaz?n davran???na benzer. BoÅŸ bir odaya belli miktarda gaz verildiÄŸi zaman, oda ne kadar büyük olursa olsun, gaz odan?n tamam?na yay?l?r. Dolay?s?yla insan?n çektiÄŸi ac?n?n 'büyüklüÄŸü' kesinlikle görecelidir.

Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices; after philosophy there must be action; the strong hand finishes what the idea has sketched.

The human soul has still greater need of the ideal than of the real. It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live.