Quotes About Philosophy

la vérité est impossible avec le langage

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?

Il m'importe peu de savoir si Dieu existe ou non ; mais ce que je sais et que je saurai jusqu'au bout, c'est qu'il n'aurait pas dû créer en même temps l'amour et la mort. Le Neutre, c'est ce Non irréductible : un Non comme suspendu devant les endurcissements de la foi et de la certitude et incorruptible par l'une et par l'autre.

Love's atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).

el miedo es a la vez lo que está "en el origen de todo", una parodia del cogito cartesiano: "Tengo miedo, luego vivo"– y

It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist, since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!

This thirty-five-page essay had been written in two or three weeks by Hamilton, as he entered the fray with all the grandiloquence and learning at his disposal. He showed himself proficient at elegant insults, an essential literary talent at the time, and possessing a precocious knowledge of history, philosophy, politics, economics, and law. In retrospect, it was clear that he had found his calling as a fearless, swashbuckling intellectual warrior who excelled in bare-knuckled controversy.

In another message he wrote, "I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.

the works of Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Hume, as well as those of such reigning legal sages as Sir William Blackstone, Hugo Grotius, and Samuel von Pufendorf. He was especially taken with the jurist Emmerich de Vattel

his optimistic view of America's potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature.

In his later years, William traded in his Baptist upbringing for a more epicurean life.

While reading the scene in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in which the tenderhearted Uncle Toby picks up a fly and delicately places it outside a window instead of killing it, Burr is said to have remarked, "Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.

In this sense, science, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, does not make it impossible to believe in God, but rather makes it possible to not believe in God.

why there is something rather than nothing: nothing is unstable.

It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.

Why is there a universe at all? Why are we here?

T]he declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question, Who created the creator? After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?

Indeed, the best answer I have ever heard to the question of what it would be like to be dead (i.e., be nonbeing) is to imagine how it felt to be before you were conceived.

For those who like to quote Aristotle's wisdom when appealing to his "Prime Mover" argument for the existence of God, let us remember that he also claimed that women had a different number of teeth than men, presumably without bothering to check.) Everything

Nevertheless, the declaration of a First Cause still leaves open the question, "Who created the creator?" After all, what is the difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one?

Socratic, they call it in college. All kinds of back and forth, designed to elicit truths implicitly known by all rational beings.

You know who Nicolaus Copernicus is?" "Was," Walker said. "Some old astronomer. Polish, I think. Proved the earth goes around the sun." Reacher nodded. "And much more than that, by implication. He asked us all to consider how likely is it that we're at the absolute center of things? What are the odds? That what we're seeing is somehow exceptional? The very best or the very worst? It's an important philosophical point.

That's your call. My philosophy is hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism.