Quotes About Philosophy

Time is the substance of which I am

Porque todo hombre culto es un teólogo, y para serlo no es indispensable la fe

El temor de lo crasamente infinito, del mero espacio, de la mera materia, tocó por un instante a Averroes. Miró el simétrico jardín; se supo envejecido, inútil, irreal.

Todas las teorías son legítimas y ninguna tiene importancia. Lo que importa es lo que se hace con ellas.

Oscuramente creyó intuir que el pasado es la substancia de que el tiempo está hecho; por ello es que éste se vuelve pasado en seguida

One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory.

The whole good cannot be had, it would seem, without mustering all the strength of our inner life. Even in the sphere of external possessions there are goods which inherently demand, if they are to be truly ours, far more of us than mere acquisition. 'My garden,' the rich man said; his gardener smiled.

The really human thing is to see the stars above the roof, to preserve our apprehension of the universality of things in the midst of the habits of daily life, and to see the world above and beyond our immediate environment.

for where the religions spirit is not tolerated, where there is no room for poetry and art, where love and death are robbed of all significant effect and reduced to the level of a banality, philosophy will never prosper.

There is an entry in Baudelaire's Journal Intime that is fearful in the precision of its cynicism: "One must work, if not from taste then at least from despair. For, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.

The liberal arts, then, include all forms of human activity which are an end in themselves; the servile arts are those which have an end beyond themselves, and more precisely an end which consists in a utilitarian result attainable in practice, a practicable result.

a consistently planned "worker" State there is no room for philosophy because philosophy cannot serve other ends than its own or it ceases to be philosophy; nor can the sciences be carried on in a philosophical manner, which means to say that there can be no such thing as university (academic) education in the full sense of the word.

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.

Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it.

The secret cause of all suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.

You don't understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours.   The god you worship is the god you deserve.

Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can't run away.

The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.