Quotes About Philosophy

I was born in Norway, and when I was little I went to live in Detroit, Michigan. My father was a professor of philosophy at Wayne University, and my mother was also a teacher.

I did this one movie with a great director named Wayne Kramer. It was 'Crossing Over,' and Harrison Ford, Ashley Judd and Ray Liotta were in it. I was one of the leads, and I thought this was it. It got shelved for two years, and then it was in theaters maybe a week. After that, I adopted a philosophy of, 'Hope for the best, expect the worst.'

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.

It's the dualistic ways of looking at things that produces the evil.

We do not believe in immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot help believing it.

There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified, we shall see that it is all matter.

So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

The simple truth of our finiteness is that we could, by whatever means, go on interminably only at the price of either losing the past and, therewith, our identity, or living only in the past and therefore without a real present. We cannot seriously wish either and thus not a physical enduring at that price.

Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.

I am indeed amazed when I consider how weak my mind is and how prone to error.

I mean the flesh, never fade! The flesh never leave the creation, see, because with that divine spirit the flesh cannot fade. If the spirit is weak then the flesh fade, seen?

To the question how one kind of labor can be measured against another, how the labor of the artisan can be measured against the labor of the artist, how the labor of the strong can be measured against the labor of the weak, the communists can give no answer.

I'm an introvert on the Myers-Briggs. I've got to have time by myself to recharge. My philosophy is sort of that humans are weak, frail, imperfect, and generally kind of bad, but every day I meet somebody who's good, and that inspires me.

I derided Christians as anti-intellectual bigots who were too weak to face the reality that there is no rhyme or reason to the world.

When you have a chance to get Phil Jackson to run your team, you just do it, plain and simple.

It is hard enough to make a plan for how you are going to spend an evening with somebody else. So to make a plan for how you are going to behave in 25 years seems based on a view of life that is incomprehensible to me.

I personally believe that our planet would be absolutely fine without religion, and I also feel we are evolving in that direction.

Everything that is necessary is also easy. You just have to accept it. And the most necessary, the most natural matter on this planet is death.

Plans never go well for me. I just live every day like I ain't gonna live the next one.

The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?

God does not play dice.