Quotes About Philosophy

Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things.

You cannot step twice into the same river.

I'd be perfectly frank with you and reply, "One of my life strategies is never to go into Sears.

Do you believe in God? Perhaps you aren't old enough. The reason old people believe in God is because they've given up believing in anything else, and one can't exist without faith in something.... God is a sort of burglar. As a young man you knock him down; as an old man, you try to conciliate him because he may knock you down. Moral: don't grow old.

I wish I could say I'd hit upon the answers to the great mysteries of life [Huncke said a few weeks before he died at age 81]. But it doesn't make any more sense to me than it did on day one.

When the war closed we were challenged with a peace-time choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of diametrically opposed doctrines - doctrines of paternalism and state socialism.

The real universe of ordinary language is that of the struggle for existence. It is indeed an ambiguous, vague, obscure universe, and is certainly in need of clarification. Moreover, such clarification may well fulfill a therapeutic function, and if philosophy would become therapeutic, it would really come into its own.

To be sure, to impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea—

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.

Das Feindstrafrecht betrachtet sein Subjekt als Sphinx: halb Mensch, halb Tier.

The greatest thinkers of Greece — Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and later Plutarch and Plotinus — derived their ideas from ancient tradition, and further on from divine revelation.

To separate between religion and metaphysics, however often it may have been attempted, is impossible

Evolution is dismissive of the eternity of moral duty and moral laws.

The more deeply we live, the more we feel in sympathy with Augustine, and the less with Pelagius.

All worldviews, therefore, end in an eschatology and all efforts at reformation are animated by faith in the future.

Ethical culture must be a philosophy of revelation or it cannot exist.

reason was cast down from this exalted pedestal by the philosophy of Kant, by the theology of Schleiermacher and with the rise of the Romantic school.

Philosophy arose out of religion,

If history is to be truly history, if it is to realize values, universally valid values, we cannot know this from the facts in themselves, but we borrow this conviction from philosophy, from our view of life and of the world — that is to say, from our faith. Just as there is no physics without metaphysics, there is no history without philosophy, without religion and ethics.

It is supernaturalism, which in point of fact forms the point of controversy between Christianity and many panegyrists of modern culture.

Formerly men said that life was thought, but now we are told that life is will.

G OD, the world and man are the three realities with which all science and all philosophy occupy themselves. The conception which we form of them and the relation in which we place them to one another determine the character of our view of the world and of life, the content of our religion, science, and morality.

One arrives at metaphysics, at a philosophy of religion, only if from another source one has gained the certainty that religion is not just an interesting phenomenon—comparable to belief in witches and ghosts—but truth, the truth that God exists, reveals himself, and is knowable.