Quotes About Philosophy

… the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception.

Avouons notre ignorance, mais ne nous résignons pas à la croire définitive.

Social thought is unable not to keep its original structure.

Religion is a defensive reaction of nature against the dissolvent power of intelligence.

Nous ne voyons pas les choses mêmes ; nous nous bornons, le plus souvent, à lire des étiquettes collées sur elles.

usually when we speak of time we think of the measurement of duration, and not of duration itself. But this duration which science eliminates, and which is so difficult to conceive and express, is what one feels and lives.

In reality, life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is composed of straight lines.

le cerveau ne détermine pas la pensée ; et par conséquent la pensée, en grande partie du moins, est indépendante du cerveau.

En ce point est quelque chose de simple, d'infiniment simple, de si extraordinairement simple que le philosophe n'a jamais réussi à le dire. Et c'est pourquoi il a parlé toute sa vie.

En nous faisant saisir dans une intuition unique des moments multiples de la durée, elle nous dégage du mouvement d'écoulement des choses, c'est-à-dire du rythme de la nécessité.

Mais l'idée que le monde entier, y compris les êtres vivants, relève de la mathématique pure, n'est qu'une vue a priori de l'esprit, qui remonte aux cartésiens.

Mais, si le souvenir n'a pas été emmagasiné par le cerveau, où donc se conserve-t-il ? - A vrai dire, je ne suis pas sûr que la question "où" ait encore un sens quand on ne parle plus d'un corps.

The theory of knowledge is inseparable from the theory of life. They must unite so that each may move the other forward.

But this metaphysics, like this science, has enfolded its deeper life in a rich tissue of symbols, forgetting something that, while science needs symbols for its analytical development, the main object of metaphysics is to do away with symbols.

W]ithin our ego, there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego, in pure space, mutual externality without succession.

Either there is no philosophy possible, and all knowledge of things is a practical knowledge aimed at the profit to be drawn from them, or else philosophy consists in placing oneself within the object itself by an effort of intuition.

Sharpness is a bourgeois concept

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Henri Frédéric Amiel

Philosophy claims to show the true nature of this world, and in a sense the claim is justified. Philosophy unmasks religion as the general theory of this inverted world, as its encyclopaedic guide, its popular logic, its "spiritual point d'honneur," and its moral justification. Philosophy liberates man from nonphilosophy, i.e., from fantastic ideas uncritically accepted. Consequently philosophy is the spiritual quintessence of its epoch.

It expresses an inveterate hopefulness and openness toward the future that has often been hard to sustain in the three decades since its publication but which characterizes Lefebvre's philosophically induced intellectual and political optimism.

C'est tellement triste quand le bonheur s'arrête que je suis pas sûr qu'il vaille le coup.