Quotes About Philosophy

At the higher realms of rationality, even reason can begin to appear irrational.

As a consequence of Wittgenstein's philosophy, the questions once asked by philosophy have now passed into the realms of poetry. The way poetry is going, it looks as if they won't be asked much longer here either. We have learned to do without God, and it looks as if we will learn to do without philosophy. It will now, alas, join the ranks of subjects which are completed (and have become completely spurious), such as alchemy, astrology, platonic love, and stylitism.

In its early years, Islam encouraged philosophical and scientific speculation: to know how the world worked was to know the mind of God.

In its early days philosophy included science – which became known as 'natural philosophy'. Thales' thinking was scientific because it could provide evidence for its conclusions. And it was philosophy because it used reason to reach these conclusions: there was no appeal to the gods or mysterious metaphysical forces. The argument was conducted entirely within the realms of this world, from which evidence could be gathered to prove or disprove its conclusions.

El propio Spinoza no tuvo ninguna duda sobre la verdad y la certeza de su pensamiento: «No pretendo haber encontrado la mejor filosofía, pero sí sé que pienso la verdadera. Si se me pregunta cómo lo sé, respondo que de la misma manera que se conoce que los tres ángulos de un triángulo suman dos ángulos rectos».

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

The fact that man never is satisfied with any stage of his finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold him, although finitude is his destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to being-itself.

It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139)

Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind.

Being human means asking the questions of one's own being and living under the impact of the answers given to this question. And, conversely, being human means receiving answers to the questions of one's own being and asking questions under the impact of the answers.

It is not Christianity as a whole, but Calvinist Protestantism whose attitude towards nature contradicts almost completely the Buddhist attitude.

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Astonishment is the root of philosophy.

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

Sometime I think; and sometime I am.

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

My soul is nothing now but the dream dreamt by matter struggling with itself!

the universe is a flaw in the purity of non-being.

Dieu a tout fait de rien. Mais le rien perce.

You have made yourself an island of time, you are a time that has become detached from that vast Time in which your indefinite duration has the subsistence and eternity of a smoke-ring.