Quotes About Philosophy

Tennyson said that if we could understand a single flower we would know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he meant that there is no deed, however so humble, which does not implicate universal history and the infinite concatenation of causes and effects. Perhaps he meant that the visible world is implicit, in its entirety, in each manifestation, just as, in the same way, will, according to Schopenhauer, is implicit, in its entirety, in each individual.

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

That imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced, is perhaps the aesthetic reality.

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Nadie es alguien, un solo hombre inmortal es todos los hombres. Como Cornelio Agrippa, soy dios, soy héroe, soy filósofo, soy demonio y soy mundo, lo cual es una fatigosa manera de decir que no soy.

Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality

Según la doctrina idealista, los verbos vivir y soñar son rigurosamente sinónimos.

El hombre olvida que es un muerto que conversa con muertos.

There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.

To think is to forget.

Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

Others died, but it happened in the past, The season (as all men know) most favorable for death. Is it possible that I, subject of Yaqub Almansur, Must die as roses had to die and Aristotle?

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

El pasado es la sustancia de que el tiempo está hecho; por ello es que éste se vuelve pasado en seguida.

To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

que mientras dromimos aqui, estamos despiertos en otro lado y que asi cada hombre es de dos hombres.

I no longer believe in literary schools now; I believe in the individual.

Today is tomorrow and yesterday.

medité en ese laberinto perdido: lo imaginé inviolado y perfecto en la cumbre secreta de una montaña, lo imaginé borrado por arrozales o debajo del agua, lo imaginé infinito, no ya de quioscos ochavados y de sendas que vuelven, sino de ríos y provincias y reinos... Pensé en un laberinto de laberintos, en un sinuoso laberinto creciente que abarca el pasado y el porvenir y que implicara de algún modo a los astros.