Quotes About Philosophy

Seneca (see Aug., CG, 6, 10) deplored this blood-soaked obscenity: One amputates his manhood, another slashes his arms. Can one fear the gods when one seeks their favour in this manner?

He had remained steadfast in agnosticism and therefore, as Mabel took comfort in remarking, 'he never denied God.' Neither did he affirm God.

Mais je croy que je Suis descendu on puiz Ténébreux onquel disoit Heraclytus estre Vereté cachée.

Saying that you are moral because you believe in a god is like saying you are an economist because you play monopoly.

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?

Every existentialist in good standing must own a gun, and every week the existentialist rulebook says that gun ought to be inserted barrel first into the mouth. Then you make a choice. Is life worth the trouble it takes to live it?

the "I" is first created, and then the world.

Only grief is possible when one thinks of oneself as a body.

There is mischief, or ignorance, as long as there is an object apart from a subject:

He lived on that high level, on the same highlands of the spirit that were disclosed in the Upanishads and Sufi classics. To go where Eckhart went is to come close to Lao Tzu and Buddha, and certainly to Jesus Christ.

to whom does this free will matter?

Nothing more can be predicated of the Self than its existence.

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')

William James wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience that religion "consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.

So form—the stuff the human body is made of—isn't really under our control. Therefore, says the Buddha, it must be the case that "form is not-self." We are not our bodies.

In the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is.

In fact, one of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we'd often be better off.

Still, suppose—just as a thought experiment—that your goal wasn't living as long as possible but rather attaining the

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

Absurdity is not an autonomous state; it does not exist in the world, but is instead exhaled from the abyss that divides us from a mute world.

As Camus' reworking of the myth reveals, liberty can be found in the oddest of places—even Oran or Hades.

Camus felt defenseless against these "deep forces rising within me that said 'no.' " No, in a word, to plans for the future, to talk about tomorrow, to things not yet done. Instead, Camus demands the weight of the present, of the earth, of a world shorn of its myths and faith in anything other than what we can see and touch and feel.

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.

Samos de Epicuro.