Quotes About Philosophy

One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs.

Augustine was right when he said that we love the truth when it enlightens us, but we hate it when it convicts us.

Contrary to what is being taught in many public schools, truth is not relative but absolute. If something is true, it's true for all people, at all times, in all places.

Socrates once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.

Folk wisdom has it that five Jews wrote the rules of society: Moses said, "The law is everything." Jesus said, "Love is everything." Marx said, "Money is everything." Freud said, "Sex is everything." Einstein said, "Everything is relative.

A corollary of this philosophy is that it is not particularly important for a teacher to understand science well. The teacher, after all, is but a coparticipant in the process of constructing "knowledge." (The deemphasis on teacher expertise is probably just as well. As physicist Alan Cromer has pointed out, the training of teachers in constructivist methodology is marvelously suited to creating confusion about the scientific points at issue.)28

Needless to say, dualistic thinking is nonetheless commonplace. In Western society, until recently, the overriding tendency was to accord a moral dignity to the "human" which elevated it above the merely natural. Of course this was done by associating humanity with an even higher realm inhabited by God, the angels, the saints, and so forth.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand Lift the farm like a lid and see Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words. A central idea of his philosophy, the notion of a 'language-game', apparently had its genesis in this incident.

Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is' (§ 6.44). 1 believe that a certain feeling of amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period, but also when I knew him.4 Whether this feeling has anything to do with

Hermann Hesse a raison de dire que les textes de Kafka ne sont ni religieux, ni métaphysiques, ni moraux , mais simplement poétiques. (p. 250)

For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment [Verhexung] of our intelligence by means of language.

Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, and philosophic exaltation of the life of reason have all left man overtly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic

Wittgenstein, if I understand him correctly, has a position much closer to that of psychoanalysis; he limits the task of philosophy to that of recognizing the inevitable insanity of language. "My aim is," he says, "to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense." "He who understands me finally recognizes [my propositions] as senseless." 12

As nothing is certain or permanent in the world, nothing either real or unreal, the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal. All goals and aims may cheat us, but if we run away from them we shall find ourselves bumping into them.

Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith.

For instance," said the boy again, "if Christmas trees were people and people were Christmas trees, we'd all be chopped down, put up in the living room, and covered in tinsel, while the trees opened our presents." "What does that have to do with it?" asked Milo. "Nothing at all," he answered, "but it's an interesting possibility, don't you think?

I often feel, and ever more deeply I realize, that Fate and character are the same conception.

Philosophy is properly home-sickness the wish to be everywhere at home.

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.

Philosophy is really nostalgia, the desire to be at home.