Quotes About Philosophy

Ah, but what is form but a bum wipe anyhow?

Philosophy is for the few.

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.

It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.

What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?

If faces were different when lit from above or below -- what was a face? What was anything?

I am by nature an optimist and by intellectual conviction a pessimist.

Who says life is fair, where is that written?

Our faith must not depend on our reason, but our reason on faith.

They are all such notions as never came into the heart of the wisest sophists in the world to conceive of; and therefore it is no wonder that a little child, under the preaching of the gospel, believes these mysteries which Plato and Aristotle were ignorant of, because they are not attained by our parts and industry, but communicated by divine and supernatural revelation.

He had read in it: "Only the unwise think that what has changed is dead." He had asked the teacher what it meant, and the teacher had said that if a flower blooms once, it goes on blooming somewhere forever. It blooms on for whoever has seen it blooming.

So it's true: Being without Being is blue.

Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can't continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He's a pretty good fellow.

The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

Of course, in philosophy, you settle one bill only by neglecting another, a strategy which must eventually fail since all of them fall due at the same time.

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form

Such a person has no place. He can't be found. He's like one of those unphysical things they talk about in science now–like one of those things that's moving, you know, always moving on, but through no space.

The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

Quantum physicist John Wheeler expressed it this way, when discussing the search for the clockwork mechanism that runs the world, "There may be no such thing as the 'glittering central mechanism of the universe' to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting.

I Think, Therefore, You Are

By convention sour, by convention sweet, by convention colored; in reality, nothing but Atoms and the Void.

Does quantum physics really say, he asked, that the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking at it? He found the idea that matter was described by probabilities especially upsetting. "God does not play dice with the universe!" he declared. To which Bohr supposedly replied, "Albert, don't tell God what to do.

But there was one thing more about quantum physics that thoroughly annoyed most of the scientists who truly understood its implications. Because it dealt so intimately with the nature of matter—and reality—quantum physics also had quite a few things to say about things that, until recently, were strictly the preserve, not of physics, but of metaphysics . . . of religion, and—whisper it softly—of philosophy.11

The atoms or the elementary particles are not real," Heisenberg said. "They form a world of potentialities and possibilities rather than one of things or facts.