Quotes About Philosophy

It is a positive starting point for philosophy when Aristotle says that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt. Moreover the world will learn that the thing is not to begin with the negative, and the reason why it has succeeded up to the present is that it has never really given itself over to the negative, and so has never seriously done what it said. Its doubt is mere child's play.

For it is great to give up one's wish, but it is greater to hold it fast after having given it up, it is great to grasp the eternal, but it is greater to hold fast to the temporal after having given it up.

If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.

sessizliklerin en kesini susmak deÄŸil, konuÅŸmaktir.

My life is utterly meaningless

an adventure that every human being has to live through, learning to be anxious so as not to be ruined either by never having been in anxiety or by sinking into it. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.

Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant – my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return. […]

When a peculiar thinker, who just by his peculiarity is more tied up with the Eternal and less with time's moment, addresses his speech to men, he is rarely understood or listened to.

Believe a woman, you will regret it, believe her not, you will also regret that; believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both; whether you believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret both. ... This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy.

If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all–what then would life be but despair?

A Reflexão é o anjo exterminador da espontaneidade… Se fosse verdade que a reflexão devesse controlar a inclinação amorosa, nunca haveria casamento.

This emphasis on the situation was particularly important in order to show that what was central for Socrates was not a fixed point but an ubique et nusquam . It was needed in order to point up the Socratic sensibility which under the subtlest and weakest contact immediately discerned the presence of the Idea, immediately felt the electricity pervading the whole existence.

Subjectivity is truth

let us speak of the wish and thereby of the sufferings; let us properly linger over this, convinced that one may learn more profoundly and more reliably what the highest is by considering suffering than by observing achievements, where so much that is distracting is present.

What is to come? What does the future hold? I don't know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.

My reflection on life altogether lacks meaning. I take it some evil spirit has put a pair of spectacles on my nose, one glass of which magnifies to an enormous degree, while the other reduces to the same degree.

From earliest childhood, an arrow of grief has been embedded in my heart. As long as it remains there, I am ironic — if it is drawn out, I will die.

For faith is this paradox, that the particular is higher than the universal

The way of objective reflection turns the individual into something accidental, and thus turns existence into an indifferent, vanishing something.

words, rejecting the doctrine of sin

Truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but a life.

for the paradox is that he as the individual puts himself in an absolute relation to the absolute.

he was a cithara-player, not a man.

Ein Spießbürger ist, wer ein absolutes Verhältnis zu relativen Dingen hat.