Quotes About Philosophy

Our assurance of being in the truth is one with our assurance of being in the world.

One cannot make a direct ontology. My 'indirect' method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being--'negative philosophy' like 'negative theology.

The task of philosophy should be to describe this labyrinth, to elaborate a concept of being such that its contradictions, neither accepted nor "transcended," still have their place. What was impossible for modern dialectical philosophies, because the dialectic which they contained remained bound by a predialectical ontology, would become possible in an ontology which reveals in being itself an overlap or movement.

The idea of institution is precisely the foundation of a personal history on the basis of contingency.

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

I'm not afraid of death.

No existo porque pienso ni pienso porque existo. Pensar es cierto, existir es un mito. Yo no existo, vivir –lo que se dice vivir– sólo los que no piensan. Los que se ponen a pensar no viven." --Dos Crímenes Barrocos, Max Aub, Crímenes Ejemplares--

But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.

I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy.

I believe there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

If alpha [the fine-structure constant] were bigger than it really is, we should not be able to distinguish matter from ether [the vacuum, nothingness], and our task to disentangle the natural laws would be hopelessly difficult. The fact however that alpha has just its value 1/137 is certainly no chance but itself a law of nature. It is clear that the explanation of this number must be the central problem of natural philosophy.

But I believe that there is no philosophical highroad in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

Once the philosophical foundation of democracy has collapsed, the statement that dictatorship is bad is rationally valid only for those who are not its beneficiaries, and there is no theoretical obstacle to the transformation of this statement into its opposite.

Philosophy is overwhelmingly complicated, its procedure depressingly slow.

los filósofos han concertado la paz con el mundo, mientras que en otro tiempo estar desunido con él pertenecía a la esencia de la filosofía. Schopenhauer y Nietzsche, desobedientes de la gran filosofía, anticiparon en sus vidas la nueva soledad del pensador.

Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true, if once understood.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

I do not believe] in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

A man is not what he thinks he is, but what he thinks, he is.

The world according to Heidegger is like a prep school for Calvinists.