Quotes About Philosophy

Life is too transcendentally humorous for a man not to take it seriously. Compared with it, Death is but a shallow jest.

Art is long, and the talk about it is even longer.

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know

The theory of relativity doesn't amount to a hill of beans when there's a bonfire in your shorts.

If we can't wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil.

Do I think I'm a holy man? Sometimes.

I am. I was. I am not. I never am.

In philosophy an individual is becoming himself.

A personal philosophical experience of moving out of a world of sense and arriving, dazed and disoriented for a while, into a universe of being.

No sé la razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón aqueja

Todo es vana arquitectura, porque dijo un sabio un día que a los sastres se debía la mitad de la hermosura.

In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience -- a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.

Party is not only, not so much, a group of men as a set of ideas and ideal aims.

Simplicity is the first thing that is lost, and the last that is regained.

In a doctrine so simple, consistency is no merit.

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates -- but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.

Between two worlds life hovers like a star, 'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge How little we know that which we are! How less we may be!

Where all have gone, and all must go To be the nothing that I was 'Ere born to life and living woe!

I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.

To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.

Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?

I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure.

Cricket — a game which the English, not being a spiritual people, have invented in order to give themselves some conception of eternity.