Quotes About Philosophy

Scepticismul este primul pas spre adev?r.

What does one say to somebody who says: 'Whatever the sum total of the elements I am composed of I am still one entity. Now one cause has only one effect. I have always been one single cause and I have therefore only ever had one effect to produce. My existence in time is therefore nothing more than a series of necessary effects'?

Now look, my friend, if you come to think it out you will find that in all things our real opinion is not the one from which we have never wavered, but the one to which we have most regularly returned.

You are going to say that I am amusing myself and that because I do not know what to do with my two travellers any more, I am throwing myself into allegory, which is the usual recourse of sterile minds.

But how do you know that the whole world hasn't its meninges, or that there isn't a big or little spider living in some corner of space with threads extending everywhere?

Tell me how it is that whoever wrote out the great scroll could have decreed that such would be the reward of a noble act? Why should I, who am merely a miserable compound of faults, take your defence while He calmly watched you being attacked, knocked down, manhandled and trampled underfoot, He who is supposed to be the embodiment of all perfection?

Even if Aristotle was not an atheist in the sense that he directly and openly attacked the divine . . . one could say that he was one in a broader sense, because his ideas on divinity indirectly tend to undermine it and destroy it.

Comment s'étaient-ils rencontrés? Par hasard, comme tout le monde. Comment s'appelaient-ils? Que vous importe? D'où venaient-ils? Du lieu le plus prochain. Où allaient-ils? Est-ce que l'on sait où l'on va? Que disaient-ils? Le maître ne disait rien; et Jacques disait que son capitaine disait que tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut.

Thales did something different. He asked questions to which he didn't know the answers.

Like all men you have a religion - at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I'd hope a religion to be...

There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide.

I know everything." Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, "I'm God!" Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.

Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke.

Staring at his own face reflected in a cup of bitter karma. For

It had occurred to Sean once - on a bender about ten years before with some buddies, Sean and a bloodstream full of bourbon turning philosophical - that maybe they HAD gotten in that car. All three of them. And what they now thought of as their life was just a dream state. That all three of them were, in reality, still eleven-year-old boys trapped in some cellar, imagining what they'd become if they ever escaped and grew up.

It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else.

Maybe I'd move to Tibet, climb a mountain with the Dalai Lama or head to Paris and wear nothing but black, grow myself a keen goatee and talk about jazz all the time. Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core.

After all this suffering, the faces seemed to ask, are we to accept that suffering is the point?

I often wonder if I am entitled to be as happy as I am, given the amount of suffering in the world.

Without a philosophy of life, we do not know how to react to what life deals us. Our happiness bounces up and down, determined by the day's events and the immediate emotions they elicit rather than by sober reflection. Without being able to place events into perspective—which comes from having a philosophy of life—we are at the mercy of events. Our ship has no destination and no compass.

The world's thinking is morally confused because it is informed by the morally confused.

If there is no God, we know there is no ultimate meaning or purpose to life: that all existence—including, of course, our own—is the result of random chance.

To be an atheist is to believe the universe came about by itself, life came from non-life by itself, and consciousness came about by itself.

Unless there is a God, all morality is just opinion and belief. And virtually every atheist philosopher has acknowledged this.