Quotes About Philosophy

By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life.

The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

Philosophers, Wittgenstein said, had made the mistake of being like scientists chasing the meaning behind things – truth, mind, time, justice, reality – when none of this really matters, or is even achievable. A philosopher might waste his time wondering how he knew the child with the cut knee screaming her head off was really in pain, while the mother would rush in with comfort and bandages. The philosopher was clearly the one with lessons to learn.

The mistake, Wittgenstein argued, is in thinking philosophy can answer these questions. It comes partly from a flawed view of language that insists that if a word has meaning, there must be a thing attached to that meaning. The philosopher asks, 'What is reality?', 'What is justice?' or 'What is the mind?' and then goes looking with logic for the identity of that thing – and of course can't find it, because they are just words.

because in the Dissolving, the fire should be light always, in the Sublimation mean, in the Coagulation temperate, continual in the Whitening, and strong in the Rubification.

They're beautiful. But sad.' Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.

If a person is intelligent, then of course he is either an agnostic or an atheist. Just as he is a physical coward. They are automatic definitions of high intelligence.

In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.

Oh,clever... what's the use of that? Are they human beings?

Utram bibis?Aquam an undam?

An answer is always a form of death.

Un raspuns este intotdeauna o forma a mortii - Eu cred ca intrebarile sunt o forma a vietii.

German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate.

Death is not in the nature of things; it is the nature of things.

Utram bibis? Aquam an undam?" Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?

Viva. Pero viva a la manera en que está viva la muerte.

In some profound way, beyond all his reasons and his experience, he was no more than an egoist - he had what I had always detected, and loathed, in Conservative philosophy… the belief that the fortunate must at all costs be allowed to retain their good fortune

a metaphysical sense of being marooned

We are not even living in the past here. We are in the pluperfect

We could not expect him to see what we are only just beginning--and with so much more knowledge and the lessons of existentialist philosophy at our disposal--to realise ourselves: that the desire to hold and the desire to enjoy are mutually destructive. His statement to himself should have been, I possess this now, therefore I am happy, instead of what it so Victorianly was: I cannot possess this forever, and therefore am sad.

Her ÅŸeyi olduÄŸu gibi kabullenmek gerekiyordu. Ama evrim yasalar?n?n bu kadar büyük bir duyars?zl?kla, bu kadar büyük bir sakarl???n ayn? zihinde var olmas?na izin verdiÄŸi düÅŸüncesi beni ç?lg?na çeviriyordu. Egom kapana k?st?r?lm?? bir tavÅŸan gibi c?yak c?yak ba??r?yordu.

The profoundest distances are never geographical.