Quotes About Philosophy

For wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected.

Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?

And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.

at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?" Zapffe's answer: "Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

Sometimes you just have to keep some distance from yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards into life.

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as if we were playing a board game we think will never end, despite the fact that it will, like it or not. And if you are too conscious of not liking it, then you may conceive of yourself as a biological paradox that cannot live with its consciousness and cannot live without it. And in so living and not living, you take your place with the undead and the human puppet.

One day it would be over for all, that terrible dream of everlasting changes that held us to a place that never should have been if its greatest intention led only to wallowing in the muck of eternity.

Better to kill time than kill oneself

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Renowned for stating his convictions in the form of a paradox, as above, Chesterton, along with anyone who has something positive or equivocal to say about the human race, comes out on top in the crusade for truth. (There is nothing paradoxical about that.) Therefore, should your truth run counter to that of individuals who devise or applaud paradoxes that stiff up the status quo, you would be well advised to take your arguments, tear them up, and throw them in someone else's garbage.

If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply "Of course" before returning to their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else.

Why should there be something rather than nothing?

Optimists may have fugitive doubts about the basic desirability of existence, but pessimists never doubt that existence is basically undesirable. If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply "Of course" before returning to their ecstasy.

reason is merely the mouthpiece of emotion.

In its quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it.

Stringently considered, then, our only natural birthright is a right to die.

What a relief, what an unburdening to have closed the book on humankind.

In the end, though, his insistence that we must imagine Sisyphus as happy is as impractical as it is feculent.

To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think—and nothing else. But even though you cannot demonstrate the truth of what you think, you can at least put it on show and see what the audience thinks.