Quotes About Philosophy

The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.

Socrates was likewise right that pissing people off is how we first, and maybe best, go about the business of provoking thought.

The business of the philosopher is well done if he succeeds in raising genuine doubt.

I never truly believed that human business was some serious thing.

Few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes.

I have a car but it's not important.

I just completed a long car trip on a Sunday in August with two small children, which believe me is enough to convince you that Samuel Beckett was right about everything.

Everybody should have a chance to rise. That's our philosophy in Ohio and that's my philosophy for America.

Nothing could be more irrational than the idea that something comes from nothing.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

We need to be agnostics first and then there is some chance at arriving at a sensible system of belief.

Taking refuge in the three jewels is no refuge at all from the conventional point of view. It's like finding a desert island in the middle of the ocean after a shipwreck—"Whew! Land!"—and then standing there and watching it being eaten away, day by day, by the ocean. That's what taking refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha is like.

My experience with forgiveness is that it sort of comes spontaneously at a certain point and to try to force it it's not really forgiveness. It's Buddhist philosophy or something spiritual jargon that you're trying to live up to but you're just using it against yourself as a reason why you're not okay.

No debo preocuparme —dijo ella—. Mientras hay vida, hay esperanza. —Qué idea tan terrible

Not an unbeliever, sir, a free-thinker. Perhaps you've never thought about the difference. As a free-thinker I can believe what I like, when I like. I can commit you, in your sad situation, to the protection of God this evening, even though tomorrow morning I shan't believe he exists. As an unbeliever I should be obliged not to believe, and that's an unwarrantable restriction on my thoughts.

The professor urged upon Fred that to base one's calculations on unobservables - such as God, such as the soul, such as the atom, such as the elementary particle - was nothing more than a comforting weakness. 'I don't deny that all human beings need comfort. But scientists should not indulge themselves on quite this scale.

Ein gutes Buch ist der kostbare Lebenssaft eines meisterlichen Geistes, einbalsamiert und aufbewahrt zum Zweck eines Lebens über das Leben hinaus (...)

God, she says, 'is an unprincipled bastard, wouldn't you agree?

I'm not sure that I believe in God.' 'Oh I do,' says Claudia. 'Who else could bugger things up so effectively?

My happiest moments are those when I think nothing, want nothing, and dream nothing, being lost in a torpor like some accidental plant, like mere moss growing on life's surface. I savour without bitterness this absurd awareness of being nothing, this foretaste of death and extinction.

Cosa so? Cosa cerco? Cosa sento? Cosa chiederei se dovessi chiedere?

A cup of coffee, a cigarette, the penetrating aroma of its smoke, myself sitting in a shadowy room with eyes half-closed...I want no more from life than my dreams and this...It doesn't seem much? I don't know. What do I know about what is little and what is a lot?

For any spirit of scientific bent, seeing more in something that is actually there is actually to see less. What you add in substance, you take away in spirit.

I'm older than Time and Space because I'm conscious.