Quotes About Philosophy

Our mortality does not call for panic, but for a sense of awe.

A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element.

Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. I began to question everything, she told me, I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher. Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them.

Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of the wretchedness of man's situation, and poured scorn on all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.

Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.

So, in what ways are you mad?

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval. That

The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by — rather than merely of how we want things to look.

Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.

Does beuty give birth to love? Or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful? Or was she beautiful because I loved her?

We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells.

We require such 'sensuous' arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truths will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material.

The more closely we analyse 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. The

The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.

A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.

Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

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.

1828 Turns forty. 'After his fortieth year,' he consoles himself, 'any man of merit Ã¢â'¬Â¦ will hardly be free from a certain touch of misanthropy.

We believe, as Nietzsche put it, that 'higher is not allowed to grow out of the lower, is not allowed to have grown at all .. everything first-rate must be causa sui [the cause of itself].

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured.

Socrates The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion. To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen to the dictates of reason

Life is cheerful, that's the devil's talk.

there can be a savage edge.