Quotes About Philosophy

Not to be a Bible-thumper, but there really is nothing new under the sun.

I'm not religious, so theres no church on Sunday.

The difference between people and ideas is... only superficial.

As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one's life or one's work. I was never given to it when I was healthy, and I am less given to it now.

Freud said that we are born as a tabula rasa. This is a model that simply is too superficial and inadequate.

When a thing is said to be not worth refuting you may be sure that either it is flagrantly stupid - in which case all comment is superfluous - or it is something formidable, the very crux of the problem.

My life is not this steeply sloping hour, in which you see me hurrying. Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree; I am only one of my many mouths, and at that, the one that will be still the soonest. I am the rest between two notes, which are somehow always in discord because Death's note wants to climb over— but in the dark interval, reconciled, they stay there trembling. And the song goes on, beautiful.

Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Life is heavier than the weight of all things.

Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.

What poet's persuasion can reconcile the length of those days with the brevity of life?

turn towards great and serious subjects, next to which irony becomes small and helpless.

Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you. (Letters on Life)

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves...

Und dann und wann ein Weiser Elephant

Is it not peculiar that nearly all of the great philosophers and psychologists have always paid attention to the earth and nothing but the earth? Would it not be more sublime to lift our eyes from this crumb, and instead of considering a speck of dust in the universe, to turn our attention to space itself?

Suchen Sie die Tiefe der Dinge: dort steigt Ironie nie hinab.

Porque lo bello no es sino el comienzo de lo terrible

gal mirusieji yra tie, kurie iš?jo pam?styti apie gyvenim?.

Here is the angel, who does not exist, and the devil, who does not exist; and man, who does exist, is in between them and, I cannot help it, their unreality makes him more real for me.

And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.