Quotes About Philosophy

We are all ill: but even a universal sickness implies an idea of health.

In any genre it may happen that the first great example contains the whole potentiality of the genre. It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o'clock in the morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love affair--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.

Unless our ideas are questioned, they become part of the furniture of eternity.

It seems like topsy-turvyland to make reason serve the irrational. Yet that is just what it has always done, and ought always to do.

Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important

People try and make out there's a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn't.

I don't have any mottoes. If I did I would forever be contradicting them.

I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.

If you ask me what minimalism is really about, I would say that it's the altering of values - enter the small doors of minimalism and come out on the other side with big ideas.

We should propagate the values of vegetarianism.

As an ideology - and certainly as a political identity - conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for.

I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values.

Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values.

I do not think that we should select judges based on a particular philosophy as opposed to temperament, commitment to judicial neutrality and commitment to other more constant values as to which there is general consensus.

Isn't that an odd philosophy for a vampire?

There's no books out there articulating what the alt-right is. If they're such great philosophers, and they have such good ideas, and they're on the vanguard of intellectualism, where are their books? They don't have any.

Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.

The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.