Quotes About Philosophy

There are two schools of thought about the resilience of time. The first is that time is highly volatile, with every small event altering the possible outcome of the earth's future. The other view is that time is rigid, and no matter how hard you try, it will always spring back toward a determined present. Myself, I do not worry about such trivialities. I simply sell ties to anyone who wants to buy one... Tie seller in Victoria, June 1983

She] used to...insist that puddings at St Granata's be randomly laced with curry powder to 'better prepare us for life's inevitable disappointments.

Puede acaso el destino ser malo como un ser inteligente, y llegar a ser monstruoso como el corazón humano?»

Creí que le importaba mucho la verdad. - Y me importa, pero una virtud llevada al extremo es un vicio. Si uno no entiende que hay cosas más importantes que la verdad no entiende lo importante que es la verdad.

Corresponding to the two basic philosophies of life, then, hedonism and biblical theism, are two views of love. Everyone, of course, is for love. The hippies are for love, the situation ethicists are for love, the followers of Hari Krishna are for love, Christians are for love. But it is true of love, as it is of heaven, that "everybody talks about it ain't got it.

If what we took to be objective reality was so fragile that it could be swept away by 400 milligrams of mescaline, then perhaps the vitalists who had argued that the brain was merely a mechanism to stabilize an anarchic world were correct. Perhaps the notion of objective reality was a paradox.

Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.

It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

Everywhere today, in fact, the ideology of competition gives way to a 'philosophy' of self-fulfillment. In a more integrated society individuals no longer compete for the possession of goods, they actualize themselves in consumption.

Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Svevo, Schnitzler, Canetti. How is it that the greatest are, in their varying degrees, violently hostile to psychoanalysis? And, ultimately, towards the end of his life, Freud himself ?

In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.

The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.

As flat as the earth before they noticed it was round. As ambiguous as the truth before they noticed it was true. As real as reality before they noticed it didn't exist. As beautiful as a woman before they noticed she wasn't one. And is the earth really round? It is when seen from another world. Just as the real is real only from our phenomenal point of view. Or, rather, from the viewpoint of the unverifiable hypothesis of its non- existence.

Against the advice of doctors, the governor refuses to allow an incurably ill man to be put out of his misery. This is the other face of capital punishment. One day we shall have to fight for the abolition of the life penalty, as we did in the past for the abolition of the death penalty. Shadows have always preceded us, and they will outlive us. We were dead before we were alive, and we shall be again.

Le monde nous a été donné comme énigmatique et inintelligible, et la tâche de la pensée est de le rendre, si possible, encore plus énigmatique et encore plus inintelligible.

Beyond the end: the only unrestricted view. Running after your shadow: the only way out from perpetual motion. Dispersing the viewpoints: the only solution to the squaring of the circle. His hypocritical air derived from the fact that he suffered simultaneously from an inferiority and a superiority complex towards himself. The principle of insufficient reason: the only things that really take place are those which do not have sufficient reason to do so.

It is by no means clear that the other exists for everyone. Does the other exist for the Savage or the Primitive? Some relationships are asymmetrical: the one may be the other for the other without this implying that the other is the other for the one. I may be other for him even though he is not the other for me.

Thought too must fragment and scatter. Thought is a spectrum, and truth, if it exists, can only show through anagrammatically in the spectrum of thought.

Boredom is out of luck: it is itself being discussed in crashingly boring terms.

le monde est cruel parce qu'il est illusion.

Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle. Up until now, it has been the business of philosophers. Today this unreality has entered into things. This then is the end of philosophy and the beginning of something else in which reality merges with its ironic refraction.