Quotes About Philosophy

Here, In concise form, is what I have characterized as "Galileo's mistake." It is an error that has been understood by philosophers from the eighteenth century onward, from David Hume to Imman-uel Kant to Thomas Kuhn, with Increasing clarity. The mistake is In the belief that nature is Its own interpreter. It is not.

They all think any minute I'm going to commit suicide. What a joke. The truth of course is the exact opposite: suicide is the only thing that keeps me alive. Whenever everything else fails, all I have to do is consider suicide and in two seconds I'm as cheerful as a nitwit. But if I could not kill myself -- ah then, I would. I can do without nembutal or murder mysteries but not without suicide.

I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That's despair?

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.

I must accept the justice of death and the injustice of more "life"; I had no right to remain a single hour.

The inconceivable idea of the sun.You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eyeAnd see it clearly in the idea of it.

The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form.

To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

And as he came he saw that it was spring,A time abhorrent to the nihilistOr searcher for the fecund minimum.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.

Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.

There is nothing in life except what one thinks of it.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.

If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the rooms and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly.

Perhaps, The man-hero is not the exceptional monster, But he that of repetition is most master.

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational

After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.