Quotes About Philosophy

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.

In our day, death was preferable.

When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon talking. He said that the medicines he sold were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, he said, if you give them enough time. It was the sort of secret I loved to discover, for it made me feel cynical and wise. I took it for a philosophy.

Soy aire y pensamiento, y nada puedo hacer.

When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon talking. He said that the medicines he sold were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, if you give them enough time. It was the sort of secret I loved to discover, for it made me feel cynical and wise. I took it for philosophy. I have always been good at waiting, you see.

I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems... you can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.

Perhaps I had inadvertently brushed up against the Buddhist axiom, that enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment.

But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology.

WHAT IT IS It is what it is. But what is it? What it is— Some soft tautology whose terms are touch Time to give, time to give it up.

Barthes found the exit to this merry-go-round by reminding himself that "it is language which is assertive, not he." It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language's assertive nature by "add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty

The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Empirically speaking, we are made from star stuff. Why aren't we talking more about that? Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining. That's what you kept telling me when we met--that in a real, material sense, what is made from where . I didn't have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it. I wanted to be near that burning. I still don't understand, but at least now my fingers ride the lip.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240.

But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem?

The joke of evolution is that it is a teleology without a point, that we, like all animals, are a project that issues in nothing. But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't know. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

But is there really such a thing as nothing, as nothingness? I don't now. I know we're still here, who knows for how long, ablaze with our care, its ongoing song.

Goethe describes blue as lively color, but one devoid of gladness. "It may be said to disturb rather than enliven.". Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionallu incapable of loving you back?

Een vriend zegt dat gender voor hem net zoiets is als kleur. Gender en kleur delen een zekere ontologische onbepaaldheid: het klopt niet helemaal om te zeggen dat een voorwerp een kleur ís, noch om te zeggen dat het een kleur hééft. Ook de context verandert: 'alle katten zijn grijs', et cetera. Ook is kleur niet echt iets 'vrijwilligs'. Maar geen van deze formuleringen betekent dat het voorwerp in kwestie 'kleurloos' is.

tired of hearing that the most resistance one could muster in a Foucauldian universe was to work the trap one is inevitably in.

Las palabras no se parecen a las cosas que designan (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)

Morirse será así, notar que algo se acerca y que no se puede evitar? Este pensamiento surge de la nada y le cae en la cabeza como una gota de vino en el agua, la mancha, oscura y expansiva, le colorea las ideas.

You see, she says to him, you cannot change what you are given, cannot bend or alter what is dealt to you.

The moon is one, but on agitated water it produces many reflections. Similarly ultimate reality is one, yet it appears to be many in a mind agitated by thoughts.