Quotes About Philosophy

Death is a sleep that ends our dreaming. Oh, that we may be allowed to wake before death wakes us.

Those words, Suzuki said, contain the basic truth of existence: Everything is always in flux. Until you accept this, you won't be able to find true equanimity. But to do that means accepting life as it is, not just what you consider the "good parts.

I've taken a different tack. After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became.

Zen teacher Lewis Richmond tells the story of hearing Shunryu Suzuki sum up Buddhism in two words. Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, "You've been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven't been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?" After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, "Everything changes.

The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about letting go as an opportunity for true awakening. One of her favorite sayings is "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us." That's what I was searching

Por eso soy partidario de la filosofía del difunto Satchel Paige, que afirmaba: «A veces me siento y pienso y otras, simplemente, me siento».

secular people don't believe in life after death, but rather, they believe in life before death.

Phil Zuckerman, "Is Faith Good for Us?" Free Inquiry 26, 5 (2006): 35–38; Gregory S. Paul, "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies," Journal of Religion and Society 7, 1 (2005):

Scientists, according to [Francis] Bacon, should not be like ants, busy doing mindless practical tasks, nor like spiders, weaving tenuous philosophical webs, but like bees, mining nature for her goodness and using it to make useful things.

If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; The space between is but an hour, The frail duration of a flower.

If you have to choose between following money or following your heart, go with your heart. There are some choices we make that cannot be corrected. Squandering your life in a job that shrivels your soul isn't one of them. Use your gifts. Follow your heart.

why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches.

A man is an angel that has gone deranged.

No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.

Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked.

Mors certa, vita incerta

Just tell me why; why the fucking why? To which the universe would hollowly respond, My ways cannot be known, oh man. Which is to say, My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.

Everything is true,' he said. 'Everything anybody has ever thought.' 'Will you be all right?' 'I'll be all right,' he said, and thought, And I'm going to die. Both those are true, too.

How'd you like to gaze at a beer can throughout eternity? It might not be so bad. There'd be nothing to fear.

I mean, after all, you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?

Everything is true, he said. Everything anybody has ever thought.

What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.