Quotes About Philosophy

The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal.

Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise

Ship, are you conscious now?" "My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.

Therefore, simple syllogism: human language is futile and stupid. Meaning furthermore that human narratives are futile and stupid.

I don't think you can get good answers to questions about—human nature. Better to think of it as a black box. You can't apply the scientific method. Not well enough to be sure of your answers.

Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....

Sometimes," she said, wiping her eyes, "sometimes I wish I could stop being Toitovna. I get so tired of it, of everything that I've done." Michel sat beside her. "We're locked in our selves to the end. This is the price one pays for thought. But which would you rather be—convict, or idiot?

But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human's reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.

Much of human language is said to be fundamentally metaphorical. This is not good news. Metaphor, according to Aristotle, is an intuitive perception of a similarity in dissimilar things. However, what is a similarity? My Juliet is the sun: in what sense? A

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on. These

Reality is mathematical, as long as you understand that uncertainty and contingency can be mathematically described, without them becoming any more certain.

Whether life means anything or not, joy is real.

After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.

All things remain in God. Even if there was no God. All things remain in something or other. Some kind of eternity outside time.

People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.

But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning. —Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia

What's the monetary value of human civilization? Trying to answer that question proves you are a moral and practical idiot. Well, economists make such calculations all the time, but that's their job, and they think it makes sense.

The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind. All double binds lead to frustration, resentment, anger, rage, bad faith, bad fate.

Malcolm said nothing to that. He swayed from side to side in his chair as a way of suggesting that life held many such small puzzles.

En ello residía la belleza de la especulación. Era

Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. They are frauds. We justify pain because we do not know what to make of it, nor do we have any choice but to bear it. Happiness alone can make us momentarily larger than ourselves.

I sometimes think that Buddhism is the toughest religion in the world. It not only eschews all talk of god but does not allow any instant remedies. Responsibility for one's own acts is its only metaphysics. So

Es una vergüeza, ¿sabe usted? Es una vergüeza vivir. La nada era tranquila y buena. En calma, apacible e ignorada, giraba en su bondad. Entonces also se movió, brotaron malas convulsiones ¿Qué demonio era el causante? ¿Qué diablo empujó la nada dándole vida? ¿De qué se vengaba? ¿Por qué deben pensar los condenados a la vida? Es una enfermadad , una horrenda maldición...

Actually, I wouldn't attack Kant after all, I could avoid that, I would just have to make an invisible detour when I came to the problem of Space and Time [...]