Quotes About Philosophy

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Anything that consoles is fake.

Was man glaubt, gibt es.

The true humanist maintains a just balance between sympathy and selection.

The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

What rules the world is idea, because ideas define the way reality is perceived

What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.

Savoir souffrir sans se plaindre, ça c'est la seule chose pratique, c'est la grande science, la leçon à apprendre, la solution du problème de la vie. [Knowing how to suffer without complaining is the only practical thing, it's the great science, the lesson to learn, the solution to the problem of life.]

He sat brooding, a Buddha who had overeaten at dinner, trying to sort wisdom out of the calories.

Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers...and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.

I prefer rationalism to atheism. The question of God and other objects-of-faith are outside reason and play no part in rationalism, thus you don't have to waste your time in either attacking or defending.

hakol havel (Hebrew: "Vanity of vanities… All is vanity"): Ecclesiastes 12:8.

Various philosophers and religious leaders tried to convince their disciples and followers that animals are nothing more than machines without a soul, without feelings. However, anyone who has ever lived with an animal--be it a dog, a bird, or even a mouse--knows that this theory is a brazen lie, invented to justify cruelty.

What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.

Centuries have not worm-eaten the solidity of this ancient furniture of the mind.

Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and Latin quivers...