Quotes About Philosophy

Who embalms the Undertaker when he dies?

There is another possibly apocryphal story about the philosopher Jerry Fodor (he's the Yogi Berra of philosophy). Someone asked what his stream of consciousness was like as he wrote philosophy. His reply was that it mostly said, "Come on, Jerry, you can do it, Jerry, keep going, Jerry.

once people stop believing in the God of the Bible, they don't believe in nothing--they begin to believe in anything.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

He argued that the spirit's bow was being unbent and risked being permanently unstrung.

Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.

American Nihilism is a mood; a mood of moodiness; a vague disquiet. It is Nihilism without the abyss.

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise----as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason.

The practical politics of all the philosophers, no matter how-great their theoretical differences, were the same. They practiced an art of writing that appealed to the prevailing moral taste of the regime in which they found themselves, but which could lead some astute readers outside of it to the Elysian Fields where the philosophers meet to talk.

Philosophy is not a doctrine but a way of life, so the philosophers, for all the differences in their teachings, have more in common with one another than with anyone else, even their own followers.

Thrasymachus sees that Socrates does not respect the city. He sees the truth about Socrates, but he cannot, at least in the beginning, appreciate him. The others appreciate him, but partly because they are blind to what is most important to him.

For modern men who live in a world transformed by abstractions and who have themselves been transformed by abstractions, the only way to experience man again is by thinking these abstractions through with the help of thinkers who did not share them and who can lead us to experiences that are difficult or impossible to have without their help.

The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.

When the liberal teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplificationsor by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.

In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates quest for man in general or man in himself.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

Our minds must make an enormous effort to find the natural sweetness of life in its fullness. The way back is at least as long as the one that brought us here. For Hobbes and Locke nature is near and unattractive, and mans movement into society was easy and unambiguously good. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the movement was hard and divided man.

A value-creating man is a plausible substitute for a good man, and some such substitute becomes practically inevitable in pop relativism, since very few persons can think of themselves as just nothing. The respectable and accessible nobility of man is to be found not in the quest for or discovery of the good life, but in creating ones own life-style, of which there is not just one but many possible, none comparable to another.

They [students] learned to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything.

Science is itself one of the modifications of amour-propre, the love of inequality.