Quotes About Philosophy

Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies.

We are reluctant to believe that all of what we are gets erased in death; we seam to ourselves deeper than the mere stoppage of life can reach. Yet the writings on "survival" and the evidence for it seem jejune. Perhaps whatever continues is unable to communicate with us, or has more important things to do, or things we'll find out soon enough anyway—how much energy, after all, do we devote to signaling to fetuses that there is a realm to follow?

as a young man I thought the ideal philosophical argument was one with the following property: someone who understood its premises and did not accept its conclusion would die.

The simplest, most comprehensive and hardest to disprove explanation for absolutely everything that ever could happen anywhere, at any time, is, of course, 'it was God's will.

Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.)

What can we know? How we should act? What might we hope for?

including Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and popularizers such as Archibald Alison, elaborating on sensibility and

In this conclusion, Freeman suggests that naturalism is Calvinism revived, and that the appropriate answer to such a cold, hard, and fruitless philosophy is the same as it was to Calvinism proper.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.

And nothing . . . disquiets a rationalist more than a forest.

Hermetic Philosophy is the "book" which the High Priestess holds on her knees, whilst the three layers on her tiara represent the stages of the descent of revelation from the mystical plane to the gnostic plane, then from the gnostic plane to the magical plane and lastly, from the magical plane to the philosophical plane-to and the plane of the "book" or the "doctrine.

Hermetic Philosophy is the "book" which the High Priestess holds on her knees, whilst the three layers on her tiara represent the stages of the descent of revelation from the mystical plane to the gnostic plane, then from the gnostic plane to the magical plane and lastly, from the magical plane to the philosophical plane-to the plane of the "book" or the "doctrine.

Only if I am going to die, I should prefer to die as I have lived, drunkenly.

If life is as meaningless as death, if guilt is as questionable as perfection, if being is no more meaningful than nonbeing, on what can one base the courage to be?

What is reality?" - "One of the many possible illusions.

a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him. A man contains all these things, but he is greater than their total.

You must realize, Mr. Blaine, that a man is not his body, for he receives his body accidentally. He is not his skills, for those are frequently born of necessity. He is not his talents, which are produced by heredity and by early environmental factors. He is not the sicknesses to which he may be predisposed, and he is not the environment that shapes him.

I have simply given up a longevity which I never possessed anyhow. I have turned away from the con game which the gods run in their heavenly side-show. I no longer care under which shell the pea of immortality might be found. I don't need it. I have my moment which is quite enough.

He was only now outgrowing his playboy phase, groping his way out of frivolity the way others might grope their way out of atheism.

Philosophers have pointed out that hell exists in this world, not the next. To observe the ranks of the damned we need only look at ourselves, for we comprise both the devils and the souls in torment.

Keynes's economics – unlike Keynesian economics – was philosophically driven. It was informed by his vision of the 'good life'; it was permeated by his theory of probability. These philosophical foundations were laid early in his life. Philosophy came before economics; and the philosophy of ends came before the philosophy of means.

The seven wise men of Greece, so famous for their wisdom all the world over, acquired all that fame, each of them, by a single sentence consisting of two or three words.

It's hard to stay away from religion when you mess with acid.