Quotes About Philosophy

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water, and nobody knows what it is." —D. H. Lawrence, Pansies

For my part, life is so many things I don't care what it is. It's not my affair to sum it up. Just now it's a cup of tea. This morning it was wormwood and gall. Hand me the sugar.

Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?

Nothingness! To accept the great nothingness of life seemed to be the one end of living. All the many busy and important little things that make up the grand sum-total of nothingness!

She had to live. It is useless to quarrel with one's bread and butter. And to expect a great deal out of life is puerile.

sun is anti-thought

We must start from what seems a be a nullity, the unknowable, the inexpressible, the creative mystery wherein we are established. We cannot become more exact than this without introducing falsehood.

But so many people... have only got their minds tacked on to their physical corpses.

She had a curious, receptive mind, which found much pleasure and amusement in listening to other folk. She was clever in leading folk on to talk. She loved ideas, and was considered very intellectual. What she liked most of all was an argument on religion or philosophy or politics, with some educated man. This she did not often enjoy. So she always had people tell her about themselves, finding her pleasure so.

You pluck flower after flower — it is never the flower. The flower itself — its calyx is a horrible gulf, it is the bottomless pit.

Well, there it was: fated like the rest of things! It was rather awful, but why kick?

And he asked himself a last question: From what, and to what, could this infinite whirl be saved?

I offer a bunch of pansies, not a wreath of immortelles. I don't want everlasting flowers and I don't want to offer them to anyone else. A flower passes, and that is perhaps the best of it… don't nail the pansy down. You won't keep it any better if you do.

When did one come to an end? In which direction was it finished? There was no end, no finish, only this roaring vast space. Did one never get old, never die? That was the clue.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God. We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their philosophy. Let us go on.

There is visible labor and invisible labor. To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act. Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work. Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy.

no matter how long you try to follow a meaningful purpose in life, impermanence always cuts it off.

When the friendly jailer gave Socrates the poison cup to drink, the jailer said: Try to bear lightly what needs must be. Socrates did. He faced death with a calmness and resignation that touched the hem of divinity.

Five hundred years before Christ was born, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus told his students that everything changes except the law of change. He said: You cannot step in the same river twice. The river changes every second; and so does the man who stepped in it. Life is a ceaseless change. The only certainty is today. Why mar the beauty of living today by trying to solve the problems of a future that is shrouded in ceaseless change and uncertainty-a future that no one can possibly foretell?

One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.

General Obregon's philosophy: "Don't be afraid of enemies who attack you. Be afraid of the friends who flatter you.

George Bernard Shaw was right. He summed it all up when he said: "The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.