Quotes About Philosophy

From these early attempts to explain things slowly came philosophy as well as our present science. Not that science explains "why" things are as they are - gravitation does not explain why things fall - but science gives so many details of "how" that we have the feeling we understand "why." Let us be clear about this point; it is by the sea of interrelated details that science seems to say "why" the universe is as it is.

The Golden Mean was considered a fundamental constant by the Egyptians and the fundamental division of the whole into two parts.

Schwaller de Lubicz identifies the Golden Mean as "the fundamental scission," or division of one into two, that creates three things - the original whole and two parts, one in golden proportion to the whole and the other in golden proportion to that.

The delicate thing about the university is that it has a mixed character, that it is suspended between its position in the eternal world, with all its corruption and evils and cruelties, and the splendid world of our imagination.

Indeed, as we have seen, the drama and tragedy of the moral life lies in the fact that most human disagreement is between opposing goods rather than between right and wrong.

All things are transient and subject to decay. To become attached to things leads to suffering. One can not truly say this belongs to me, or this is what I truly am. The answer to all things cannot be found in the outer world of things or self-concepts.

The Gnostic Christ (and the historical Jesus), like the Buddha, like Krishna, like Lao Tzu, taught that all material things are impermanent—whether they be riches, or one's own body. Attachment to that which is impermanent causes suffering. Give up attachment and suffering ceases.

Was there a logical answer, something he could accept without slipping on banana skins of mysticism?

When matter is put aside, all creation becomes exclusively mental, that's all.

What did it matter what he did? Life would be equally purposeless no matter what his decision was.

And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any cave painter suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life.

What should we mean by intelligence? It is not a question of fact, for there is no fact; it is a moral question. There is a shouldness in it.

There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around.

Maybe to save time is not to lengthen life, after all. Maybe the more efficiently you speed through life, the quicker you reach your death.

A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

What conveys a right, and why should humans, alone on all the planet, have them?

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

Smart enough to see that you're a sack of rotting meat wrapped around a little sewage tube that's going to give out in—what? Another few thousand sunrises?

Life will not answer to reason. And meaning is too young a thing to have much power over it.

that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being . . . the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos.

The great paradox of existence may be that only the dead certainty of losing everything makes anything at all worth keeping.

It occurs to Adam where the word radical came from. Radix. Wrad. Root. The plant's, the planet's, brain.