Quotes About Philosophy

I gladly conspire with you, as all we men of philosophy breathe the same air of questions wheresoever we reside.

Yet to die alone would be honest. For is not life solitary, and every thinker lonely?

Why must man struggle to live, when he inevitably dies?

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

Philosophy could be severed from life.

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.

Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Belief traps or frees us.

Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.

Nihilism is not the last word. The last word is imagination.

Carry shadow on your back, embrace light in your arms," the Tao Te Ching tells us)

La claridad que la filosofía ofrece lleva a la superación serena de la ansiedad que carcome al hombre.

La actividad filosófica no es neutral. Desde la República de Platón hasta la íntima relación entre brahmino y ksatriya en las Upanisad la filosofía se encuentra íntimamente ligada con la política. No hace falta esperar a Marx para establecer esta conexión. Toda la historia de la filosofía es una confirmación de ello.

El Ser es hablante antes que pensante.

The why of the mind's existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason - especially its penchant for moral reasoning - will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.

My only armor is my belief that life has meaning...

Nothing in this world, not even the most mundane moments of our lives, is without meaning, nor is any of it lost forever.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility.… —T. S. Eliot, East Coker

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?

The darkness was not an absence of light, but an absence of meaning, for meaning arose only from the exercise of free will.

pessimism is strictly for people who are over-educated and unimaginative.

Remember Carl Jung. Werner Heisenberg. The tenuous nature of reality on the quantum level. Attitude, attitude, attitude!

no one here ever took the work of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud seriously. So there had been no Lenin, no Soviet Union, no communism or fascism; and two hundred million people who, elsewhere, had been killed by those regimes, had not been killed here.

Carson heard that expression more often these days—It is what it is—and it nettled him every time someone spoke it.