Quotes About Philosophy

There are no 'men-in-themselves' such as the philosophers talk about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personal cast, who contend in battle with a given world and win through or fail, while the universe around them moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life — life, indeed, in the Nietzschean sense, a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power.

Philosophie, die Liebe zur Wahrheit, ist im tiefsten Grunde die Abwehr des Unbegreiflichen.

We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that it is life which dominates reason.

Von Goethe stammt auch das tiefe Wort, daß der Mathematiker nur insofern vollkommen sei, als er das Schöne des Wahren in sich empfinde.

Can criticism the, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope, we call the secret a problem.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge… Descartes meant to doubt everything, but certainly not the value of his doubting.

To Goethe we owe the profound saying: 'The mathematician is only complete insofar as he feels within himself the beauty of the true'. Here we feel how nearly the secret of number is related to the secret of artistic creation. Mathematics, then, are an art. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.

Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworhtiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, … deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.

The decision must be made between Judaism and Christianity, between business and culture, between male and female, between the race and the individual, between unworthiness and worth, between the earthly and the higher life, between negation and the God-like. Mankind has the choice to make. There are only two poles, and there is no middle way.

I have come to the law which I shall now formulate by a method the validity of which I shall now have to prove. The law runs as follows :("For true sexual union it is necessary that there come together a complete male (M) and a complete female (F), even although in different cases the M and F are distributed between the two individuals in different proportions.)

Napoleon the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself.

No one can understand himself, for to do that he would have to get outside himself; the subject of the knowing and willing activity would have to become its own object.

Woman is soulless and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will.

The artist has breathed in the world to breathe it out again; the philosopher has the world outside him and he has to absorb it.

I only care for the subjective life; I am very German, you see: The woods interest me, and the world does not.

Sad? Oh, I don't see that; nothing in life is worth calling sad. According to Heraclitus, everything is sad; according to Democritus, nothing is sad. The true secret is to take things as they come, and not trouble yourself sufficiently about anything to give it power to trouble you.

Where grave philosophers have watched the setting sun die out of the sky, as the glories of their own youth have died away unvalued, till lost for ever. Where ascetic reading-men have mooned along its banks blind to all the loveliness of the water-lily below, or the clouds above, as they took their constitutional and pondered their prize essay.

Out campaigning, one is free from all that trash. Before the cannon's mouth men cannot stop to split straws; and with one's own life on a thread, one cannot stop to ruin another's character. I do not know how it is — I have read pretty widely, but philosophers never preached endurance to me as well as Nature.

If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought. Why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy?

Nobody who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.

It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen.