Quotes About Philosophy

I think the genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why and how we should go – 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.

There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires.

We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectability of existence

The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary.

Happiness is good for the body," Proust tells us, "but it is grief which develops the strengths of the mind.

better off pursuing tormented love affairs than reading Plato or Spinoza.

Time abbreviated itself, like an accordion that is lived in extension but remembered only in contraction.

A single idea recurs throughout his work: that we best endure those frustrations which we have prepared ourselves for and understand and are hurt most by those we least expected and cannot fathom. Philosophy must reconcile us to the true dimensions of reality, and so spare us, if not frustration itself, then at least its panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions.

When I consider … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me ['l'infinie immensité des espaces que j'ignore et qui m'ignorent'], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? Pascal, Pensées

Nada que no asuma un riesgo calculado con la fealdad puede ser bello.

In the course of his own life and it''s misfortunes, he (a man) will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself ... more as a knower than as a sufferer. - Schopenhauer

It is the task of philosophy to let you down gently.

One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one's life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?

I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with necessary scepticism.

Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.

Old Korean adage, Even jade has flaws. Or, in other words: Nothing in life is ever perfect.

There might be more to the universe than any one religion could explain.

Your religion is all about being miserable, and wretched. Ours had time for play, and joy. How is this an improvement?

I have always considered Pascal's Wager a questionable bet to place, since any God worth believing in would prefer an honest agnostic to a calculating hypocrite.

The point is that if the knowledge that provides the categories we use to describe our observations is defective, the observation statements that presuppose those categories are similarly defective.

The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.

it was disbelief in the universality of moral truth, and the failure to see that human beings are by nature capable of gaining access to moral truth, that created the intellectual perversions of pragmatism and positivism alike.

positivists were people without firm moral commitments and therefore without any means of resisting the dogmatic certainties of communism and fascism.