Quotes About Philosophy

It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.

The human person, the human being, is not just an object among objects, not just a thing in the world. The human being is a being-in-the-world, a being-with-others, a being-for-others.

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

I do not rest on the broad upland of a system that includes a series of sure statements about the absolutes, but on a narrow, rocky ridge between the gulfs where there is no sureness of expressible knowledge but [only] the certainty of meeting what remains, undisclosed.

True unity cannot be found, it can only be created. He who creates it realizes the unity of the world in the unity of his soul. Thus beforehand he must live through the tension of the world in his soul as his own soul's tension.

The legendary anecdote goes one stop beyond: the single incident in question conveys the meaning of life.

King of Prussia, PA

The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness." .

The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is "How should I know?"… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

It is part of the pholosophic dullness of our time that there are millions of rational monsters walking about on their hind legs, observing the world through pairs of flexible little lenses, periodically supplying themselves with energy by pushing organic substances through holes in their faces, who see nothing fabulous whatever about themselves.

Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains

Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders; he's a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard; sometimes he's a cerebrate.

Truth is rarely writ in ink; it lives in nature.

The natural philosophers are mostly gone. We modern scientists are adding too many decimals.

Not fact-finding, but attainment to philosophy is the aim of science.

Why should moral distinction be made between death by the spirochete and death by the streptococcus?

Follow Descartes! Do not give up the religion of your youth until you get a better one.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.