Quotes About Philosophy

Every man wants to be happy, but in order to be so he needs first to understand what happiness is. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

at the bottom of all meaning lies a residue of nonsense.

The idea that old men become peaceful or philosophical--what shit. One learns to endure, that is all. [Édouard Manet]

The authentic answer is always the question's vitality. It can close in around the question, but it does so in order to preserve the question by keeping it open.

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again.

To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power according to which, when I speak, it is the world that declares itself, the clear light of day that develops through tasks undertaken, through action and time.

One thing must be understood : I have said nothing extraordinary or even surprising. What is extraordinary begins at the moment I stop. But I am no longer able to speak of it.

The feeling of the uselessness of what I am doing is linked to this other feeling that nothing is more serious.

Where he is, only being speaks—which means that language doesn't speak any more, but is.

One's thinking about me makes me feel this self; one's not thinking about me leaves me in this self that exceeds me."-"At least disappear in this thought.

As long as I live, I am a mortal man, but when I die, by ceasing to be a man I also cease to be mortal, I am no longer capable of dying, and my impending death horrifies me because I see it as it is: no longer death but the impossibility of dying.

They do not think of death, having no other relation but with death.

Because chance infidelities do not prevent one thinking, indeed rather the contrary, of the person to whom one is being unfaithful; indeed it is the most frequent manner of being faithful that men have.

It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.

Maurice Maeterlinck

As soon as we put something into words, we devalue it in a strange way. We think we have plunged into the depths of the abyss, and when we return to the surface the drop of water on our pale fingertips no longer resembles the sea from which it comes. We delude ourselves that we have discovered a wonderful treasure trove, and when we return to the light of day we find that we have brought back only false stones and shards of glass; and yet the treasure goes on glimmering in the dark, unaltered.

El dolor es inevitable, el sufrimiento es opcional.

Evit?m s? ne gândim la moarte pân? când nu mai avem for?a, n-a? spune, de a gândi, ci chiar de a respira.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

T)he philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts nothing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning , that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.