Quotes About Philosophy

The next day I had a hangover. I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.

She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of 'the wise choice of many alternatives'.

Walt Whitman was right about at least one thing. You will contradict yourself. You are large. You contain multitudes.

Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.

But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,' he said, wisely. 'You're quoting

You will never live if you're looking for the meaning of life.

He – or She – or whichever pronoun God is –

Music is about time,' I told her. 'It is about controlling time.' When she stopped playing, she looked thoughtful for a moment and said something like, 'I sometimes want to stop time. I sometimes want, in a happy moment, for a church bell never to ring again. I want not to ever have to go to the marker again. I want for the starlings to stop flying in the sky... But we are all at the mercy of time. We are all the strings, aren't we?

Free will might be overrated. 'Anxiety,' Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, 'is the dizziness of freedom.

on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, 'My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.' 'That's Montaigne, isn't it?' And she would give the tiniest nod. 'I quote others only in order the better to express myself,' she'd say, which was itself, I sensed, another quote.

True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing - Socrates

Maar als je op zoek bent naar de zin van het leven zul je nooit leven,' zei hij wijs. (Camus)

And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.

El pasado y el futuro son mitos. El pasado no es más que un presente muerto y el futuro, en cualquier caso, nunca existirá, porque para cuando uno llega al futuro ya se ha convertido en presente.

It didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

Bertrand Russell wrote that 'To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead'.

Je hoeft het leven niet te begrijpen. Je hoeft het alleen maar te léven.

You can clone human brains but not what is stored inside them

My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it. Friedrich Nietzsche

Erwin Schrödinger . . .' 'He of the cat.

Henry David Thoreau's Walden, both

Ten books that helped my mind 1.  Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke 2. Poems – Emily Dickinson 3. Henry David Thoreau's journal 4.  When Things Fall Apart – Pema Chödrön 5.  The House at Pooh Corner – A.A. Milne 6.  Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott 7. Meditations – Marcus Aurelius 8. Tao Te Ching – Laozi 9. Serious Concerns – Wendy Cope 10. Dream Work – Mary Oliver

Betrand Russell wrote that "To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead".