Quotes About Philosophy

How charming is divine Philosophy! Not harsh, and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets, Where no crude surfet raigns.

But past who can recall, or don undoe? Not God Omnipotent, nor Fate

Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, Why was it made? goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.

Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.

I do not wish to criticize any system that can nourish people's spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing cherry-picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them; it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but is what I would call "soft" thinking.

The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty says the body is not an object to think about. Rather, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings, which move towards equilibrium.

At a deeper level, time is but eternity living dangerously.

The real mystery is not that things are the way they are, but that there is something rather than nothing.

All thinking that is imbued with wonder is graceful and gracious thinking. Thought

Dostoyevsky, who was a believer, wrote that the "death of a single infant calls into question the existence of God."1

It was around Clifford's era that Thomas Huxley coined the term agnostic, which did not exist before the nineteenth century. Agnostics, Huxley said, "totally refuse to commit" to either denying or affirming the supernatural.

But a philosopher named William James responded that sometimes Clifford's advice is bad strategy. He said doubt is the wrong alternative when three conditions are met: when we have live options, when the stakes are momentous, and when we must make a choice.3

If you want to know what happiness is, you need to go to the philosophers. Start with the Wikipedia article "Philosophy of Happiness." Then go to the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, search for "happiness," and follow through the articles that come up to see what various philosophers have said. Then read the philosophers' works themselves. By the time you're done, you'll probably be dead, whether or not you are happy.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. —OSCAR WILDE

The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Now observe; if the artist does not understand the sacredness of the truth of Impression, and supposes that, once quitting hold of his first thought, he may by Philosophy compose something prettier than he saw and mightier than he felt, it is all over with him. Every such attempt at composition will be utterly abortive, and end in something that is neither true nor fanciful; something geographically useless, and intellectually absurd.

Hey, people get killed from time to time, that's just the way of the world, let's not bust a budget about it . . .

Why would a just God allow this to happen? Was it all part of an evolutionary clockwork that God allowed to work through itself, unguided, an enormous experiment of some kind, for good reasons that humans couldn't perceive?

this life. We're just a bunch of meat. When we think something, it's just chemicals. When we love something, it's more chemicals. When we die, all the chemicals go back in the ground, and that's it. There's nothing left. You don't go anywhere, except in the ground. No heaven, no hell, no God, no nothing. Just . . . nothing.

God is a hack," he said. "He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?

How is it so far?" asked Cloud. "How is what so far?" "This," Cloud said, and motioned around him. "Life. The universe. Everything." "It's lonely," Jared said. "Huh," Cloud said. "Didn't take you long to figure that one out.

Sometimes I don't know if my life is complicated, or if it's that I just think too much about things.

Libertarians secretly worried that ultimately someone will figure out the whole of their political philosophy boils down to "Get Off My Property." News flash: This is not really a big secret to the rest of us.   I