Quotes About Philosophy

As coisas estão longe de ser todas tão tangíveis e dizíveis quanto se nos pretenderia fazer crer; a maior parte dos acontecimentos é inexprimível e ocorre num espaço em que nenhuma palavra pisou.

Look, the trees are; the houses we live in still stand. We alone go past them like an exchange of vapors. And things conspire to tell us nothing, half in shame, perhaps, half in unspoken hope.

Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.

So much has been written (both well and poorly) about things that the things themselves no longer hold an opinion but appear only to mark the imaginary point of intersection for certain clever theories. Whoever wants to say anything about them speaks in reality only about the views of his predecessors and lapses into a semipolemical spirit that stands in exact opposition to the naïve productive spirit with which each object wants to be grasped and understood.

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then have to be human—and, escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? . . .

Os filósofos deveriam ser pacientes e esperar, e não querer fundar uma soberania, nem um reino que se mantenha com os meios do seu tempo. Eles são os reis do vindouro, e as suas coroas ainda são unas com os minérios que enchem as veias das montanhas...

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life.

I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others.

But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant.

Who am I? But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body. Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain, but that seemed less like a suitable answer than something I'd read somewhere.

But at the same time I was puzzled: How could anyone's fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant—not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients.

Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.

To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind.

Sleep is not, death is not; Who seem to die Live. House you were born in, Friends of your spring-time, old man and young maid, Day's toil and it's guerdon, They are all vanishing, Fleeing to fables, Cannot be moored

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.

A man is a god in ruins.

A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.

He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

The world we live in is but thickened light.