Quotes About Philosophy

He is not concerned with arguments to establish a position, as in much traditional philosophy. Rather, he is teaching a skill that is critical and destabilizing, seeking to fracture the artificial unities we construct with our minds, so that we can see differences.

Wittgenstein sent the Tractatus to several publishers who rejected it, including his own university press — Cambridge, which was to distinguish itself by rejecting all his writing.

Facts are in logical space and independent of one another and can only be stated or asserted.

He had an early formulation of what in the Tractatus he saw more clearly — that we can speak of existence only when we assert the truth of some proposition that is not itself existential.

Philosophy should take thoughts that are otherwise turbid and blurred, so to speak, and make them clear and sharp.

The nature of the case and the history of philosophy combine to recommend to us this division of intellectual labour between Academies and Universities. To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new.

Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.

Logic is relative.

It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

Garp drank the beer and wondered if everything was an anticlimax..

In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy. Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners. But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.

If I had to be anything, he told her, I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.

What is this fascination the world has with death?

The thing about sin, Jack, is that some people think it's very important and other people don't even believe it exists.

And the trick of having faith, he said, was that it was necessary to believe in God without any great or even remotely reassuring evidence that we don't inhabit a godless universe.

Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

In the life of a man," wrote Marcus Aurelius, "his time is but a moment . . .

In both classes, Pastor Merrill preached his doubt-is-the-essence-of-and-not-the-opposite-of-faith philosophy

WHY SHOULD SOMEONE WHO'S GOT SUCH A WORKED-OUT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD BORE YOU? WHY SHOULDN'T YOU BE INTERESTED IN SOMEONE WHO'S WORKED OUT A WAY TO SEE THE WORLD? THAT'S WHAT MAKES WRITERS INTERESTING!

Defoe's Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's moralizing fable, Rasselas.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade

For axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.