Quotes About Philosophy

In the world of ideas everything was clear in life all was obscure, embroiled.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn't been very good for truth of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

After all, what is an individual?

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle.

La filosofía nos enseña a sentir incertidumbre ante las cosas que nos parecen evidentes. La propaganda, en cambio, nos enseña a aceptar como evidentes cosas sobre las que sería razonable suspender nuestro juicio o sentir dudas.

Was and will make me ill, I take a gramme and only am. (Lenina)

There was something called Christianity.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

I took my [mescaline] pill at eleven ... I spent several minutes – or was it several centuries? – not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them – or rather being myself in them; or, to be still more accurate (for I was not involved in the case, nor in a certain sense were they) being my Not-self in the Not-self which was the chair.

But God doesn't change.' 'Men do, though.' 'What difference does that make?' 'All the difference in the world.

I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

Te obiÅŸnuieÅŸti ÅŸi cu asta, repet? el. Cincizeci la sut? din consol?rile filosofiei în cinci cuvinte. Iar cealalt? jum?tate poate fi exprimat? în ÅŸase: când eÅŸti mort, eÅŸti mort, frate. Sau, dac? preferi, o poÅ£i exprima în opt: nici când eÅŸti mort, frate, nu eÅŸti mort.

He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

What's the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn't the rationalization of your feelings? If you've never had a religious experience, it's folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can't eat them without being sick.

What is the mind? The question is, of course, ultimately quite unanswerable. We do not and we cannot know what mind really is. We do not and cannot know, of that matter, what anything really is.

Como seria divertido", pensou, "se não se tivesse de pensar na felicidade!

That which, in the language of religion, is called "this world" is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.

make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being...

The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945

I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?

I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs," the writer and philosopher recollected. "Those folds in the trousers ? what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel ? how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.