Quotes About Philosophy

Let us try to see things from their better side: You complain about seeing thorny rose bushes; Me, I rejoice and give thanks to the gods That thorns have roses.

The human mind is so complex and things are so tangled up with each other that, to explain a blade of straw, one would have to take to pieces an entire universe.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate.

Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad.

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes and Avicenna became heretics whose influence disappeared under the weight of rote preaching and practice. Islam as a result has a moral code, a legalistic system of right and wrong, but no evolved ethical tradition.

The reason I could never be an atheist is because when they get together they have literally nothing to talk about.

The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?

sages leave speculation to the idle, and contemplate Nature.

One must know how to disregard the vehicle of the idea in order to consider its motivation alone.

When we can no longer divide, we are beyond Nature and approach the causal Cause, the abstract Cause. This is why the whole of metaphysics, all creation, is situated between the numbers One and Two.

Chanakya wanted to establish a society which laid greater stress on spiritual satisfaction rather than on physical pleasures. According to him, for the development of inner strength and character, spiritual development was necessary.

Chanakya says that like rain serves no purpose over a sea, a candle is useless in daylight, it is useless to feed a person who is not hungry and give alms to a rich person. Chanakya says that rain is required in fields and candle is required in darkness; food must be fed to a hungry person and alms must be given to the poor.

Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it serves no purpose. It's a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care.

Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote - dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper's boot stomps.

Of course, like Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wingenstein, Kant never formed an intimate tie or reared a family.

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

I've read Waiting for Godot three times and I still can't tell you what it is about. If, as some critics claim, it is about being bored while waiting for God to return, then it's even duller than I thought.

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care. It is the most common text found on Roman graves.

You never believed in God, Doc, did you? You said if God created man in His image, why couldn't man invent a God that was more anthropomorphic, less gratuitously remote, who, like his enemy, Satan, resembled us?