Quotes About Philosophy

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is14—not his essence, or what he is.

But if Maximus is "a mystic like Dionysius", he is surely "a mystic who is also a metaphysician, an ascetic who has reached, through his familiarity with Aristotelian philosophy, a consistency and precision of thought that one looks for in vain in the works of the Areopagite.

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity.98 Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

this speciously deep thought was to haunt Christian metaphysics: that love without pain and guilt remains simply a joke, a game.

The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea.

La significatividad inherente a lo bello del arte, de la obra de arte, remite a algo que no está de modo inmediato en la visión comprensible como tal.

Such a reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.

Every theory of social action is ultimately a philosophy of history. It attempts, as best it may, to read in the experience of mankind the lessons which would justify its own special urgency.

I can't believe that what anyone is at this moment saying has ever happened has never happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing. This is the only thing that has ever happened.

The individual' is an idea like other ideas.

I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God.

If a human artist or employer made children suffer so that something immensely impressive or valuable could come to pass, we would put him in prison. Why then should we excuse God for causing such undeserved pain, no matter how wonderful the ultimate result may be?

Plato made this point several thousand years ago when he wrote: "The virtuous man is content to dream what the wicked man really does.

Mothers are the most instinctive philosophers.

Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit.

We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

The Christian mind is the prerequisite of Christian thinking, and Christian thinking is the prerequisite for Christian action.

For the thief and the humanitarian each have the same motive — to do what he believes will make him feel good. In fact, we can't avoid a very significant conclusion: Everyone is selfish.

A big philosophical breakthrough for me was the realization that my own freedom was not only possible, but far more important than the establishment of a free society.

Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit ?