Quotes About Philosophy

As Karl Marx once noted: ' Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd "I Myself am Heav'n and Hell." —Omar Khayyám, The Rubaiyat

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let's call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature.

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, or Rawls's fairness ethics, but in science as well.

Natural rights theory arose during the Enlightenment to counter the belief in the divine right of kings, and became the basis of the social contract that gave rise to democracy, a superior system for the protection of human rights. This is what the English philosopher John Locke had in mind in his 1690 Second Treatise of Government (written to rebut Sir Robert Filmer's 1680 Patriarcha, which defended the divine right of kings8

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great … He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err.

The components of a philosophy must stand or fall on their own internal consistency or empirical support, regardless of the founder's or followers' personality quirks or moral inconsistencies.

Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non -A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)

We are lucidly aware that achieving through mere physical force establishes the rules of a game from which there is no escape. When one grants oneself the moral justification to use force, one cannot logically deny it in one's enemies, for all moralities are relative. The dissimilarity between different human cultures alone suggests that one cannot establish universal goods and evils.

There is nothing wrong with appearances, so long as we realize that that is what they are (this will always be a leading motif in Nietzsche's work).

Sartre wrote after describing his epiphany that his life was nothing but a play, and he an actor in it

Indeed, in 1933 he refused to leave Freiburg to teach in Berlin, explaining that his 'philosophical work ... belongs right in the midst of the peasants' work'.

Death opens up the question of Being ... It is the shrine of Nothing and the shelter of Being.

rooted in 'the forgetting of Being'.

Mrs Husserl was reported on occasion to have introduced Heidegger to others as her husband's 'phenomenological child'.

There is nothing worse than a proud stoic. -- The Big Why

Lou Dobbs, a mainstay of Trump support and philosophy, told Bannon he could not believe how delusional Trump had become.

Old age puts more wrinkles in our minds than on our faces.

When I religiously confess myself to myself, I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

I want death to find me planting my cabbages.

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.

Man is certainly crazy. He could not make a mite, and he makes gods by the dozen.