Quotes About Philosophy

The beautiful in its pure form can safely be left to the idealists, while the half-beautiful and the ugly occupy empiricists.

Nietzsche's] questions - transcend, but where to; ascend, but to what height? - would have answered themselves if he had calmly kept both feet on the ascetic ground. He was too sick to follow his most important insight: that the main thing in life is to take the minor things seriously. When minor things grow stronger, the danger posed by the main thing is contained; then climbing higher in the minor things means advancing in the main thing.

The disciple of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking and then as a way of life.

In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.

Here, I shall take the name of Karl Marx to represent many philosophers from this tendency. Although he may only be a dubious witness for concern with democracy, there can be no doubt of his pioneering role in subordinating the theoretical to the practical life. His work is associated with the fateful incursion of the real into the sphere of theory.

with the basic tenet of Marxism: where there was contemplation, there should now be mobilization. The abiding catastrophe of now-impure theory began with the introduction of militancy before the March 1848 revolution and its presupposition of civil war in philosophy.

Philosophy, as Plato endowed it to posterity, is a child of defeat that simultaneously compensates for this defeat by ingeniously attacking it as the best form of defense.

fact, almost everything that was philosophically articulated in the nineteenth century and the twentieth, from the Young Hegelians to French Existentialism, from the early Socialists to Critical Theory, grew in the conservatories of a second romantic loser atmosphere.

The notion of private ideas had no ground in [prehistoric] emotional experience.... The notion of a private interior in which the subject can close the door behind it, reflect upon and express itself was unknown before the early individualistic turn in antiquity; its propagandists were the men known as sages or philosophers.... who first gave the motif that true thought was only possible as independent thought, as thinking differently from the stupid masses....

contrast, ancient European access to the experiential world was preformed by grammatical dressage; in fact, in this literacy zone the actual intellectual material offered by the world was formatted according to letter, syllable, line, page, paragraph, and chapter.

How much truth is contained in something can be best determined by making it thoroughly laughable and then watching to see how much joking around it can take. For truth is a matter that can withstand mockery, that is freshened by any ironic gesture directed at it. Whatever cannot withstand satire is false.

Ventilation is the profound secret of existence.

It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to colour (colorare) the mind with wisdom; it must be pickled (macerare) in it, as it were, soaked in it (inficere), and entirely transformed by it.

Further, for once, I like the idea that people who think I'm a constant voice for the furthering of the imagination have to see that interest in a more materialistic fashion.

The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume summed up the dilemma succinctly when he wrote of God: 'Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then

Publilius Syrus say: amare et sapere vix deo conced-itur? Even a god finds it hard to love and be wise at the same time.

scepticism by means of classical arguments, the most effective means initially to promote arousal. And

This approach shares an assumption, one dating from the ancient Greeks, that human reasoning can be a source of knowledge.

I have found it helpful to ask not 'In what circumstances is a plank a part of a ship?' but, rather, 'In what circumstances do planks compose (add up to, form) something?

When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. —MARK TWAIN

For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?

Los seres humanos no podrían soportar una vida carente de sentido.»

Es posible que la existencia carezca de sentido. Y sin embargo, la pasión de vivir es más fuerte que la explicación de la vida.»

he pugnaciously advanced his view that the study of 'high culture' has to be the main aim of education. Above all, he said, we must pay attention to ancient Greece, because it provided 'the models for modern achievement'. Bloom believed that the philosophers and poets of the classical world are those from whom we have most to learn, because the big issues they raised have not changed as the years have passed.