Quotes About Philosophy

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.

The truth springs from arguments amongst friends.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them

A wise man apportions his beliefs to the evidence.

The identity that we ascribe to things is only a fictitious one, established by the mind, not a peculiar nature belonging to what we're talking about.

How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And, after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? Let us remember the story of the Indian philosopher and his elephant. It was never more applicable than to the present subject. If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world.

Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides.

Now I have to say I'm a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it's a natural fact of life.

We won't have a theory of everything without a theory of consciousness

Some say that consciousness is an "illusion," but I have little idea what this could even mean. It seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world.

Figure 35 Princess Elisabeth and René Descartes in Minecraft.

A common view of knowledge, going back to Plato, is that knowledge is justified, true belief. To know something, you have to think it's true (that's belief), you have to be right about it (that's truth), and you have to have good reasons for believing it (that's justification).

Technophilosophy is a combination of (1) asking philosophical questions about technology and (2) using technology to help answer traditional philosophical questions.

Increasingly, I learned that the great spirits of religious traditions do not solve all questions but live in the questions, and return to them again and again, not as a circle returns, but as an ascending spiral comes to the same place, each time at a higher level.

it is a response to a reality beyond us. Far from being trapped in tribal illusions, we are liberated by transcendent truths.

It is significant that the major world religions having studied the problem of unrelieved suffering for over 2000 years, have independently concluded that there is no justification for euthanasia or PAS. There

I did wonder what happened when we died, though, and I'd wondered about it for most of my life. Thinking that nothing happened, that there was absolutely nothing following all of this pain, seemed just as silly as magic. No, there had to be something.

Thus, reason tells us that it is rational to accept what reason alone cannot demonstrate.

watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.

The Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit has suggested that the important thing is not a person's identity but his or her identifications. Tablet: A New Read on Jewish Life