Quotes About Philosophy

No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for the existence of a snow-flake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves.

Taking a final pleasure in what the wind can neither proclaim nor destroy, I am a student of nightfall, I claim no other profession.

Immanuel Kant, autor subversivo en tiempos de sinrazón

El alma es la suma de las cosas que uno ha vivido antes de hacerse un canalla escéptico" La flaqueza del bolchevique, capítulo XI

I think about how it's not knowing that torments all of us. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we'll never know why.

During her lectures, she explains the difference between the beautiful and the sublime this way: The stars are beautiful—diamonds, twinkles, something you can wish upon. The space in between the stars is the sublime—cold, black, and infinite, something that inspires awe and fear.

The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

Their philosophy was that you should not always trust your senses and sense experience in order to understand the world, but should rely ultimately on logic and mathematics.

When it comes to the meaning of space and time the difficulty we have is not surprising, for we are ourselves imprisoned within them, and it is hard to free our minds from their confines and 'see' reality from the outside.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Albert Einstein

It seems that no matter how hard we try, or how unreasonable the resulting definition of reality, we just cannot avoid having to invoke the collapse of the wavefunction.

For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were revealed to be quantum mechanisms, the worlds of science and philosophy were set on a collision course. instead of truth and comprehension, we got deeply unsettling questions about what we can ever hope to know about the world.

But it would be naïve to think that this extraordinary success has drawn us ever closer to comprehending a reality of things-in-themselves

Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

But I don't understand God. I don't understand how he could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.

Got to die of something, Giraldi observed. Might as well put back a few pints while you wait to see what it is.

It gets sort of Zen after a while," Butters said brightly. "Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is a jar.

I've heard that nature abhors a vacuum—though if that's true, then I can't figure why about ninety-nine zillion percent of creation is vacuum.

I don't know the good or the evil of the thing. That's something that only you mortals worry about.

Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day," I said. "But set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. Tao of Pratchett.

It gets kind of zen after awhile, life is a journey, time is a river, the door is ajar.

I do not perceive myself to be mad. But if I were truly mad, would I be able to tell?

the beginning of wisdom is in realizing that one knows nothing, then the beginning of understanding is in realizing that all things exist in accord with a single truth: Large things are made of smaller things. Drops

Harry waxes poetic about magic. He'll go on and on about how it comes from your feelings, and how it's a deep statement about the nature of your soul, and then he'll whip out some kind of half-divine, half-insane philosophy he's cobbled together from the words of saints and comic books about the importance of handling power responsibly.