Quotes About Philosophy

no soy más que un hombre. Y todas las elucubraciones filosóficas que puedo conjurar no me salvan de desearte, todos los días, a cada momento ni el despiadado gemido del tiempo, el tiempo que nunca puedo pasar contigo, dentro de mi cabeza. Te amo profundamente, totalmente. Y será siempre así.

Guardarle rencor al destino no conduce a nada; las cosas suceden sin razón ni ritmo alguno, no se puede decir nada más. Ir en contra de ese destino es como censurar el humo del fuego o el mismo viento, excepto cargar con aquello que te ha tocado en suerte y seguir adelante.

Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend.

Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men's minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish.

If we have nothing to write about but nothing to write about, then that is what we have to write about.

[The great economists] can be called the worldly philosophers, for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man's activities—his drive for wealth.

Robert L. Heilbroner

It is that wealth is inextricably associated with inequality. This is an insight that we get from a most unlikely source, the first of the great philosophers of capitalism, who wrote that "wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. . . . The affluence of the rich supposes the indigence of the many." It is Adam Smith speaking, not Karl Marx.11

While he values science he understands that apart from God there is no reliable basis for doing science.

We're all dying. That's what defines the condition of living." -Winston S. Churchill

The obvious reason for this is that Plato is himself mythopoeic: when he abandons dialectic to "theologize," he does so not by interpreting existing texts or stories but by generating new myths.

A person obsessed with ultimate truth is a person asking to be relieved of money.

I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew — no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.

We were like St. Augustine's definition of time: "Out of the future that is not yet, into the present that is just becoming, back to the past that no longer is.

Because it is gone you cannot say it will not return; even though you may say it has never yet returned-you cannot say that it will not. It is blasphemy to say a bit of metal has destroyed life, just as it is presumptuous to say that because life has disappeared it has been destroyed. I stood among the heaps of the dead and I knew-no, I felt that death is only a sound we make to signify the Thing we do not know.

Death is an inconvenience, to be sure," The Wizard Landau Bain, Lucky Stiff (still writing it)

Seen through the eyes of Arab alchemists, or Persian mystics, the earliest Greek philosophers weren't just thinkers or rationalists. They were links in an initiatory succession

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.

The rationalist is convinced that every sophont is at bottom predictable, acting according to consistent (if not necessarily already well-known) rules. The mystic, for his part, believes that every creature conceals within its breast some element of the wild and unpredictable.