Quotes About Philosophy

Master-meaning! Concealed revealment! I spent my twenties wanting to be Lévi-Strauss – which is ironic, since he spent most of his life wanting to be somebody or something else: a philosopher, say, or novelist, or poet.

Incomprehensible is no better than banal – it's just its flip-side.

It's very fluid, this space between philosophy and literature, and that's something that resonates for me.

Right up front, let me pass on an important lesson I've learned about the role of assumption and belief in our lives. It demonstrates our need for the discipline of philosophy, in an unusual way.

The unexamined life isn't worth the high price that you must pay for it.

Your distress about life might mean you have been living for the wrong reason, not that you have no reason for living.

I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.

But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals

French Enlightenment philosophers liked to use slavery as a symbol of human oppression, and particularly political oppression. "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains," wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract in 1762. A generation of crusading lawyers put Enlightenment principles into action by helping slaves sue for the right to be treated as ordinary French subjects.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek

A sense of humor...is superior to any religion so far devised.

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not. Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end. Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm. There is only one serious question. And that is: Who knows how to make love stay? Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.

If we're not supposed to eat animals, how come they're made out of meat?

The way I figure it, we know we got this world, so live in this one while you're here. I figure the next one will take care of itself.

Trying to change yourself is as hard as trying to change the universe. Maybe there's no difference. The fact is, shit happens none of us plan on.

Coffeehouses were centers of self-education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation, and, in some cases, political fermentation. But above all they were clearinghouses for news and gossip, linked by the circulation of customers, publications, and information from one establishment to the next. Collectively, Europe's coffeehouses functioned as the Internet of the Age of Reason.

By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life.

There is no hope of any major increase in scientific knowledge by grafting or adding the new on top of the old," Bacon declared in his book The New Logic, published in 1620. "The restoration of the sciences must start from the bottom-most foundations—unless we prefer to go round in perpetual circles at a contemptibly slow rate.

Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?

Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end