Quotes About Philosophy

Los pensamientos de todos los hombres surgen de la oscuridad. Si eres el movimiento de tu alma, y la causa de ese movimiento te precede, entonces, ¿cómo podrías llamar tuyos a tus pensamientos? ¿Cómo podrías ser otra cosa que un esclavo de la oscuridad que antecede a todo?

It … It … It is what it is!

Tir hoila ishrahoi, coi ri pirith mutoi'on; Tir miyil oitossi, kun ri mursal arilil hi; Tirsa hir'gingall vo'is?

The ability to pass judgment without work or research has got to be the coolest consumer good since the invention of philosophy.

Man lives in time but his life transcends time.

Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.

Always remember the words of Descartes: The reading of all good books is like conversion with the finest men of the past centuries.

I get maudlin. Some people drink; some get depressed; some run around having sex with anyone with a pulse. Me, I get philosophical. It's healthier.

Aristotle might have walked here, he thought. Might have scratched out that first copy of On Sphere Making, sitting at a table right over there.

I'm old, girl. Gonna die of something. Might as well be chocolate.

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.

We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves

I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soulmate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.

I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soulmate. Just in case she was mine.

It's only a game if there is an absence of meaning.

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing.

The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body—and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink.

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly?

such a God as the theologians would have us pray to—a God who in a world of suffering aids some but not others—cannot contain the mercy ascribed to him. Therefore, I say: such God as we pray to does not exist. And to this I add: there is no divine intervention. There is no divine judge. So we must supply for ourselves notions of good and ill. This is the purview and millstone of the philosophe.

Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. The phrase encompassed Spinoza's radical notion that God and nature might be one and the same. It was the springing-off point for Spinoza's mind-bending contentions about extension, determinism, and more.

The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body--and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.

What sort of life is possible—with no ground beneath one's feet except the logic of one's own mind?

Deus sive Natura.

For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?