Quotes About Philosophy

The secret to life is: there is no secret.

I'm drawn to literature instead as a form of thinking

Religion has no positive value.

Zarathustra is the prophet of the Church of the Serpent. He himself was distinctly serpentine. Nietzsche is one of the snake philosophers. He has venom towards the weak and the meek. He has the fierce bite of knowledge. We all need the Serpent's Kiss if we wish to become enlightened. You must poison your old self if you wish to find your new self, your higher self. Your old views are poisonous. Poison must meet poison.

The most elementary book on arithmetic contains more knowledge and insight about reality than the collected sayings of every guru who ever lived.

The happiness equation, it seems, is to be stupid, unconscious, and a slave to God. Then God will love you and everything will be perfect. It's amazing how many people love that equation. It's basically the equation that rules the lives of dogs! If you want to keep your freedom then you must kill God! That's the only way. God must die so that God may live – the new God. To repeat, God is dead, long live the new God.

Ancient Greece was and is a muse because it was the first to recognize beauty and march towards it without fear.

When Nietzsche said, "God is dead", he himself immediately replaced God with a new God, the Superman. Who would bother with Nietzsche's philosophy if he pronounced God dead and then hanged himself? Nietzsche immediately resurrected God, hence God was never dead. God is always ready to be re-expressed. It's not the concept of God that's wrong, it's the concept of the wrong God, wrongly defined and understood.

How on earth Nietzsche, a supporter of Dionysus, went through a phase of vegetarianism is mind-boggling. Just as bad, Nietzsche was no fan of alcohol. No wonder Dionysus smote his sacrilegious ass and drove him insane, a common fate for all those that defy Dionysus.

Mind can easily explain matter. Matter cannot explain mind at all. How do you get to mind from mindless matter? It's impossible. But mind can create "matter", or what passes as matter, routinely. It does it every time we dream.

When a subject declares intellectual philosophy useless, you can be sure it won't be making any intellectual defense of its position.

Multiverse theorists are certainly stark mad. They cannot make a worm, yet they will be making entire universes without a second thought.

Science is what you get when you restrict philosophy to just materialism and empiricism and scrupulously ignore everything else, without any justification. Science invented a materialist, empiricist method to exclude every other philosophical stance. It didn't debate other philosophies, it just referred them to its method, which paradigmatically omitted them! A bit like Christians referring all other religions to the Bible, and never allowing the conversation to extend beyond its pages.

Despite what it says, science is actually just a philosophy – the philosophy of materialism and empiricism – but it refuses to commit itself to this. It refuses to state why materialism is right and idealism is wrong. It refuses to state why empiricism is right and rationalism is wrong. And if it ever actually got into any of this, if it dared, it would be intellectually destroyed. That's why it completely avoids the whole issue.

When man no longer regards himself as karmic he ceases to be so. That's the end of karma right there – when people stop believing in it, stop taking the idea seriously, stop treating it as real. Hinduism and Buddhism are total nonsense because they are predicated on karma, which is an illusion! They themselves say so!

After all, how could I be a person if Ultimate Reality were impersonal?

Albert Einstein was asked one day by a friend "Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?" "Yes, it would be possible," he replied, "but it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning—as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation in wave pressure." RONALD W. CLARK, Einstein: The Life and Times

As the philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill has said, 'If we are to place or refuse trust we need either unmediated evidence of others

As the philosopher Baroness Onora O'Neill has said, 'If we are to place or refuse trust we need either unmediated evidence of others' honesty, competence or reliability or mediated evidence that can be checked.

Alternately and/or all at once, the Socratic pharmakon petrifies and vivifies, anesthetizes and sensitizes, appeases and anguishes.

Time is the thing that everyone knows intimately – until you ask them to tell you about It.

The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...

What did the mystic say to the hot dog vendor?" Sophia's eyebrows pulled together. "I don't know, Isaiah, what did the mystic say?" "Make me one with everything.

If there is no true creation then there is no true reality. If nothing is real, then man is not real; man in some fundamental sense does not exist. Reality is all a dream, and worse, it is less than a dream because even a dream must have a dreamer to dream it. To