Quotes About Philosophy

The wish of all things is to continue to be what they are. --Spinoza

What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?

French mathematician Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963): "The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain." I

Who is to say where you are?' Mirkady asked lightly. 'Some say there is a different world for every story ever told or untold, that there is no such thing as the here and now, only the unfolding of infinite possibilities, all of them real in some place or other.' 'In which case,' Dwarmo said, vastly amused, 'there is no such thing as a mistake.

The truth on the subject is that communism and atheism are intrinsically related and that one cannot be a good Communist without being an atheist and every atheist is a potential Communist

Here, too, are some freaks who did harm in their own way. They have names not like Mao and Che and Fidel and the other usual suspects who the world already knows too well, but names like Crowley, Duranty, Hay, Reich, Benjamin, Alinsky, Millett, the Frankfurt School—more elusive targets off the radar, and who the world should know more about, at the least because they serve as subtle (or not so subtle) markers and cautionary tales of the consequences of these ideas.

I cannot be grasped in the here and now. For my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.

The tragedy of contemporary philosophy is that it has been castrated.

Philosophers and poets may be truth seekers. Lawyers only want to win.

Yogi Berra reportedly said, "It's not the heat, it's the humility.

Wetiko is elusive and mercurial, for whatever we say wetiko is, it isn't, in that it is always more, less, and other than what we are able to say it is in language.

That Socrates was unpretentious almost to a fault, never believing wisdom was his alone or made him superior, but that everyone possessed it if one could only talk it out.

One can understand that there are more methodical arguments for revolution, but few that are more persuasive than this one: it takes leisure to be a man.

Like many students, I found the drudgery of real experiments and the slowness of progress a complete shock, and at my low points I contemplated other alternative careers including study of the philosophy or sociology of science.

Freud was not a scientist, although that's the way he thought of himself.

When there is no place for Zen in the head of our generation, it is in grievous trouble.

Moderately wise a man should be— don't wish for too much wisdom; a man's heart is seldom happy if he is truly wise. Moderately wise a man should be— don't wish for too much wisdom; if you can't see far into the future, you can live free from care.32

History may always become a kind of evasion of the search for truth. It is always possible to hide behind history so as to affirm nothing on one's own account...Ultimately, the skeptical historian no longer searches for anything, and the dogmatic philosopher has nothing but enemies or students but never friends.

Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen.

Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.

What did beauty matter, anyway?

The body was an organic machine, period, and God was a figment of its fitful imagination.

In the days before people asked questions of every innocent thing, before this relentless need to name, to label, to categorize. People had understood that life might be rich, complicated, ambiguous.

Only priests are wise enough to fear, rather than covet, the gifts the gods may give.