Quotes About Philosophy

El absurdo es que no parezca un absurdo -dijo sibilinamente Oliveira-. El absurdo es que salgas por la mañana a la puerta y encuentres la botella de leche en el umbral y te quedes tan tranquilo porque ayer te pasó lo mismo y mañana te volverá a pasar. Es ese estancamiento, ese así sea, esa sospechosa carencia de excepciones. Yo no sé, che, habría que intentar otro camino.

if the Now moves, it must move with respect to time. But the Now is time. So is it moving with respect to itself? No, says Williams, that doesn't make sense. If it's moving, it must be moving with respect to a second time – the second one being the time with respect to which the first one moves. Tensers

Aristotle (384–322 BC), the Greek philosopher, held that time is simply the measure of motion. Time is the measure of one physical process against another.

If no God, there must at least be a pattern-making demiurge.

Fraser's mother, Janice, was actually quite a happy soul but she had to hide it because, like all pseudo intellectuals, she thought being cheery made her look stupid, which of course she was for believing that rubbish in the first place. She like to talk about Sartre sometimes, just as insurance.

I always suspected the perpetrators of both good and evil probably would have behaved the same way, God or no God.

cynic is the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I hung up, figuring that if this was the last three minutes of my life, I didn't want to spend them extraordinarily annoyed.

We are finite beings; how can we understand the infinite?

As the saying goes, a cynic is the man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Do you ever get the feeling that the world is tired, Walter?' I stood there, not quite sure of what to say next. He looked embarrassed. 'I'm sorry. I sometimes forget myself and wax philosophic in the afternoons.' I walked over to the door and pushed it open, pausing to lean against the frame. 'I don't know about the world, but I sure as hell get that way.' He smiled, I smiled, and I left.

I do not worry about dying and someday I will die - whereas you worry about dying and someday you will die

There's no such thing as God, Charlie, at least not how they say.

At age forty-two, Ben Franklin retired from his profession as newspaper and magazine publisher to the American colonies to pursue other interests. His aim now was to satisfy his insatiable scientific curiosity. What caused a high-pitched violin to break a glass? Why does electricity go through water but not wood? Such questions then fell under the heading of natural philosophy, what we today call physics. (The term "scientist" was not coined until 1833.)

You live in, what you believe in.

But religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers.

We humans may think of ourselves as solid objects, all flesh and bone. But take a close look, and it's clear our bodies are composed largely of oxygen and hydrogen. We are essentially ephemeral – akin as much to wind water, and fire as to earth.

There is nothing in man or nature that does not ask questions.

I haven't got the goddamnedest idea of what the hell you're talking about. Kierkeguard, what's that? Sounds like deodorant, which is to say that the whole thing smells as far as I'm concerned.

Eventually I understood that a man in possession of Bildung was more than merely cultivated: he was ideally purified by humanism, an aristocrat of sensibility and wisdom.

Obviously not," said Pettigrew, beginning to feel like a participant in one of Plato's dialogues when Socrates really got going.

It is impossible to communicate to people who have not experienced it the undefinable menace of total rationalism.

Contradiction is an inseparable part of the human condition, and that suffices as a source of miraculousness.

Had Beta been French, perhaps he would've been an existentialist, probably though that would not have satisfied him. He smiled contemptuously at mental speculations, for he remembered seeing philosophers fighting over garbage in the concentration camps. Human thought had no significance; subterfuge and self-deception were easy to decipher: all that really counted was the movement of matter.