Quotes About Philosophy

I raised my hand and asked if God was a spirit. And he said yes, He was. So I asked if it was right that a spirit was different from a person because it didn't have a body, wasn't material. And when he agreed, I asked how, if God was a spirit, He could be a man, if He didn't have a body or anything.

I guess God can be whatever God wants to be. Maybe God's so great that even our little rules about material reality and our tiny little universe don't mean anything to God. You ever think of that?

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.

And as we leave Donne and Walton on the shores of Metahemeralism, we wave a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore.

Nihil sub sole novum, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

I mean, this man was not /Voltaire/ we killed.

Because I don't care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here's the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe.

There's a pattern and we're a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you'd ever looked at or thought of as light.

the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.

I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?

The absurd does not liberate; it binds. —ALBERT CAMUS

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh. ? Donna Tartt, The Secret History

But how," said Charles, who was close to tears, "how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?" Henry lit a cigarette. "I prefer to think of it," he had said, "as redistribution of matter.

I think this goes more to the idea of 'relentless irony' than 'divine providence.

Aristotle said in the poetics, that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.

I think about it quite a bit, actually, that look on his face. I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greak. ?????? ?? ????. Beauty is harsh.

La morte è la madre della bellezza» disse Henry. «E cos'è la bellezza?» «Terrore.»

does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end -- and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint.

And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it -- although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand.

It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?

We have art in order not to die from the truth. — NIETZSCHE

Deprendi miserum et

I prefer to think of it as redistribution of matter.

is death really so terrible a thing?