Quotes About Philosophy

My judicial philosophy is straightforward.

We've become embarrassed about asking ourselves the straightforward, simple questions that are actually the most relevent: what is it to be human? How can we steer a course between self-indulgence and self-denial and be the very best version of ourselves that we can?

All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

Is it not truly extraordinary to realise that ever since men have walked, no-one has ever asked why they walk, how they walk, whether they walk, whether they might walk better, what they achieve by walking, whether they might not have the means to regulate, change or analyse their walk: questions that bear on all the systems of philosophy, psychology and politics with which the world is preoccupied? Honoré de Balzac (1938 [1833]:

L'antropologia, dal mio punto di vista, è una filosofia che include le persone.

Misplaced pride has no place in the heart of a true Je'daii.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. Epicurus

At best the chaotic river, alive in the senses briefly, is discountable, has no standing in definition; before the severity of Cartesian doubt, it does not exist

in our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.' – David Hume, Scottish philosopher

What wonderful minds we have, even though they don't seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.

It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

lost much. The thought of my body's chirality

Come have a drink with me?" "Isn't it early for that?" Callie shrugged. "We have a saying: 'It's always five o'clock in space.

I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.

The best general definition I have ever read is in the noted philosopher and writer Milton Mayeroff's 1972 book On Caring: "Love is the selfless promotion of the growth of the other." When you are able to help others grow to become the best people they can be, you are being loving—and you, too, grow.

You don't rejoice despite absurdity, but because of it. Life is absurd so nothing compels you at all. There is no logic and no necessity. You do what you do out of freedom. You are always free to choose.

Life was something you didn't argue with, because when it came down to it, whether you barracked for God or nothing at all, life was all there was. And death.

God is a circle whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and philosopher who thought reality was best experienced through a soul in tune with the rhythms of the earth.