Quotes About Philosophy

All central beliefs on human matters spring from a personal predicament.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made

The underlying assumption that human nature is basically the same at all times, everywhere, and obeys eternal laws beyond human control, is a conception that only a handful of bold thinkers have dared to question.

People] cannot live without seeking to describe and explain the universe to themselves. The models they use in doing this must deeply affect their lives, not least when they are unconscious; much of [their] misery and frustration…is due to the mechanical and unconscious, as well as deliberate, application of models where they do not work…The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist [people] to understand themselves and thus operate in the open and not wildly, in the dark.

The view that the truth is one and undivided, and the same for all men everywhere at all times, whether one finds it in the pronouncements of sacred books, traditional wisdom, the authority of churches, democratic majorities, observation and experiment conducted by qualified experts, or the convictions of simple folks uncorrupted by civilisation---this view, in one form or another, is central to western thought, which stems from Plato and his disciples.

philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization....but if professors can truly wield this fatal power, may it not be that only other professors, or, at least, other thinkers can alone disarm them?

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me. This action makes me remember my strength which I forget at all times. I educate myself proportionately to my captured thought. I aim only to distinguish the contradiction between my mind and nothingness.

It is not foolish to ask a question of the world. We of Vlar-rei make songs or our questions. It is only foolish to want answers.

Of all our possessions, wisdom alone is imortal.

Every dogma has its day, but ideals are eternal.

The world of dew is the world of dew. And yet, and yet--

The wise and sagacious men of ancient times had the very spirit of the martial and did not kill.

An earthworm close by sighed and said, "Well now, men are clear enough about what they've understood, but can't infer one thing from another. The men who lecture on the Four Books and the Six Classics,1 with their magnificent and noble principles, would none of them understand commentary on their own minds. Thus, once separated from their books, they are unable to understand the mind at all.

Design is not for philosophy it's for life.

A wise man cares not for that which he cannot have.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.

Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.

Esiste una leggerezza della pensosità, così come tutti sappiamo che esiste una leggerezza della frivolezza; anzi, la leggerezza pensosa può far apparire la frivolezza come pesante e opaca.

While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. "What use will that be to you?", he was asked. "At least I will learn this melody before I die.