Quotes About Philosophy

I don't believe in religion. Religion is darkness.

If it happened, it happened. Why should it have to mean anything?

O sa fiu cinstit. Nu ateii imi stau in gat, ci agnosticii. Indoiala e buna un timp. Toti trebuie sa trecem prin Gradina Ghetsemani. Daca si Cristos a simtit-o, trebuie s-o facem si noi. Daca Cristos a petrecut o noapte dureroasa in rugaciune, daca a izbucnit, pe cruce:"Doamne, Dumnezeul meu, de ce m-ai parasit?", atunci toti avem dreptul la indoiala.Dar trebuie sa mergem mai departe. A alege indoiala ca filozofie de viata e la fel cum ai alege imobilitatea ca mijloc de transport.

It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while......But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? (p. 302)

But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Reality escapes us. It's beyond description, even a simple pear. Time eats everything.

But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.

You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!

Religion is part of the human make-up. It's also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Well, we can't say any more than we can say there is no god, there is no afterlife. We can only say there is no persuasive evidence for or argument for it.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

Religion is not going to come up with any new arguments.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?

Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with.

Horrle was nodding gravely, humoring him, probably thinking that out of all these two hundred fun-loving people it was just his luck to have run into a doom merchant. McIntyre had committed the sin of pessimism, of course, forgetting, as a Brit, that out here optimism was more than a state of mind; optimism was a philosophy.

Heidegger is excited by Kant's suggestion that the "thing in itself" is not different from the appearance, but merely the same thing viewed under a different light.

the unconscious is unknown and unrepresentable and, in being so, maintains by default the idealistic fantasy of gaining conscious meaning and control.

for Continental philosophy, the idea of consciousness and of an independent self-agency is ultimately a useless fantasy that boils down to an impossible desire for self-control – because it is impossible for us to know all that goes on in the mind at any one time.

Live and die in Aristotle's works.

Hell is just a frame of mind.