Quotes About Philosophy

The ancient sages understood that the good life needed to be more than just survival, that perfect health and many years to enjoy it was as real a satisfaction as could be found,

We all want answers to the big questions.

Words lose their meaning when you look at them too long. 'God.' 'Science.' Meaning.

did anyone really believe in God anymore? In Satan? That there truly was a daily battle between good and evil waged within our souls and for our souls?

The American criminal justice system had long been predicated on a simple belief: 'It's better to let a hundred guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person.' But not anymore. Now the prevailing philosophy was, 'It's better to convict a hundred innocent people than to let one guilty person go free.' Crime had changed America. Americans.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Metaphors are lies.

If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.

I stink, therefore I think.

Propositions become either pure or impure, not true or false.

Plato called this anamnesis, remembering what and who we are, beneath our lives' shifting camouflage, beyond what can be taken away.

The glass is always completely full-half air and half liquid.

Conservatism is the antidote to tyranny. It's the only one. It's based on thousands of years of human experience. There is nothing narrow about the conservative philosophy. It's a liberating philosophy. It is a magnificent philosophy. It is a philosophy for the ages, for all times.

I realized that conservatism was the philosophy that best suited me, with its emphasis on individual liberty, personal responsibility, and merit.

Locke, Montesquieu, many of the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, and the Founders, among others, knew that the history of organized government is mostly a history of a relative few and perfidious men co-opting, coercing, and eventually repressing the many through the centralization and consolidation of authority.

Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments.

Natural law is superior to, and precedes, political and governmental institutions.

Locke said, as have others, that natural law is forever and enduring, and man-made law, which may vary from place to place and time to time, clearly is not. That which is just and virtuous is just and virtuous regardless of the passage of laws or time.

Locke said, as have others, that natural law is forever and enduring, and man-made law, which may vary from place to place and time to time, clearly is not.

Oh, we are in an angsty mood tonight!" "True, true. And what good does it do? Maybe 'we' think too much, in between bouts of not thinking enough." "I think you've just written out the recipe for being human.

It is the poet and philosopher who provide the community of objectives in which the artist participates. Their chief preoccupation, like the artist, is the expression in concrete form of their notions of reality. Like him, they deal with the verities of time and space, life and death, and the heights of exaltation as well as the depths of despair. The preoccupation with these eternal problems creates a common ground which transcends the disparity in the means used to achieve them.

Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.

The function of religion is to make us feel better, by peddling a lie. The function of philosophy, and a carefully chosen birthday card, is to make us feel worse, by telling the truth. And the truth is of course: we get worse.

With the possible exception of the higher reaches of pure mathematics or theoretical physics, one can scarcely imagine anything more inhuman than philosophy. Its worship of logic in all its cold, crystalline purity; its determination to stride the bleak and icy mountaintops of theory and abstraction: to be a philosopher is to be existentially deracinated. Philosophers should be offered condolences rather than encouragement.