Quotes About Philosophy

We all know that we'll die someday, but believing it is another thing entirely.

If I accepted one supernatural occurrence, I should certainly accept others; it was only logical.

They got me reading people like physicist David Bohm with new and passionate interest. He helped me because he turned the essential question upside down. I'd been asking, since everything in the world looks so separate, how can the connections that would seem to be required by this evidence be possible? On the other hand, Bohm was asking, since everything in the world is interconnected, how come everything looks so separate?

As for me, I believe that if there's a God - and I am as neutral on the subject as is possible - then the most basic proof of His existence is black humor. What else explains it, that odd, reliable comfort that billows up at the worst moments, like a beautiful sunset woven out of the smoke over a bombed city.

I think our job--maybe even our 'duty'--is to--To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.

Faced by the accomplished fact, it was really rather useless for him to mind. What was the good of minding the actual and the fininshed? ....to allow oneself to be upset because something had been done which one considers a pity, or even disastrous, is to double the misfortune. Why throw after what is already gone one's own good temper and serenity?

Put out? My dear Gertrud, I have been thinking of very serious things. You cannot expect me to frolic along paths of thought that lead to mighty and unpleasant truths. Why should I always smile? I am not a Cheshire cat.

It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad about.

Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.

Why do anything-- why wash my hair, why read Moby Dick, why fall in love, why sit through six hours of Nicholas Nickleby, why care about American intervention in Central America, why spend time trying to get into the right schools, why dance to the music when all of us are just slouching toward the same inevitable conclusion? The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

The shortness of life, I keep saying, makes everything seem pointless when I think about the longness of death.

You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights.

My improved affect did not in any way sway me from the philosophical conviction that life, at its height and at its depth, basically sucks.

My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.

God resolves all given time," said Cai philosophically and trudged away into darkness. And Cadfael returned along the path with the uncomfortable feeling that God, nevertheless, required a little help from men, and what he mostly got was hindrance.

We believe that the applause of silence is the only kind that counts.

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

Si longue que soit la vie, elle n'est qu'un long retard de la mort

Ah, crap! Isn't Wrong worth the same as Right?

Yet it puzzled me that no one around me seemed to take God very seriously. We neither believed nor disbelieved. He was our oldest habit.

On July 25, 1943, the day Mussolini fell, I was with Luce trying to shake off his objection to a long essay I had written for Fortune's philosophy series on the vision of democracy according to Emerson, Melville, Whitman.

We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old philosophies, and that from them arise most of the old philosophical fights and arguments.

a few philosophers really do important work. This applies to the so called critical philosophy and to the theory of knowledge or epistemology. This class of workers I call epistemologists to avoid the disagreeable implications of the term philosopher.

If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be identical with themselves, the old dictum that everything is identical with itself becomes in [todays u...