Quotes About Philosophy

Herzen declared that there were "no solutions": history, like nature, was an improvisation, subject to the play of chance.

I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or 'human flourishing'.

established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as opposed to the philosophic impulse, which is to doubt & inquire. They should prefer the risk of being wrong and in love to being in doubt and without love.

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.

In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one's mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser, though he has lost and I think that is the lesson of tragedy.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicit a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.