Quotes About Philosophy

One of my friends, reading the title of these lectures [The Whence and Whither of Man] said: "Of man's origin you know nothing, of his future you know less."

Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.

I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on.

The height of all philosophy is to know thyself; and the end of this knowledge is to know God.

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.

The new knowledge has not yet settled in culture. It has not yet been integrated in a new cosmic conception.

The purest idealism is unconsciously equivalent to the deepest knowledge.

There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.

The strongest knowledge (that of the total freedom of the human will) is nonetheless the poorest in successes: for it always has the strongest opponent, human vanity.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

Does it not occur to people that I might be artificial by nature?

Maybe knowledge is as fundamental, or even more fundamental than [material] reality.

A successful account enables us to understand human knowledge in general.

Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.

Knowing the plumbing of the universe, intricate and awe-inspiring though that plumbing might be, is a far cry from discovering its purpose.

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

As Plato insisted two thousand years ago, it is not by means of the image that moral, ethical, or political knowledge is produced.

The simplest questions are the hardest to answer.

In ancient times, those who followed the Way did not try to give people knowledge thereof, but kept them ignorant.

Epistemic competence might be posterior to knowledge conceptually, however, while still prior metaphysically.

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it.

Everything is the same, nothing is worthwhile, the world is senseless, knowledge strangles.

All names of good and evil are images; they do not speak out, they only hint. He is a fool who seeks knowledge from them.

No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew it was the greatest of evils.