Quotes About Philosophy

As a devoted follower of Anthroposophy—Rudolf Steiner's early-twentieth-century spiritual philosophy that comes with comprehensive rules of conduct—Johanna did not believe in inoculating her children against whooping cough. Steiner had declared that "these inoculations will influence the human body in a way that will make it refuse to give a home to the spiritual inclinations of the soul." So Johanna did not vaccinate her children.

through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining?" —ADAM PHILLIPS, BRITISH PSYCHOANALYST AND PHILOSOPHER (1954–), FREUDIAN EXISTENTIALIST

sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne. He once quipped, "My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

La perspectiva de leer a filósofos griegos de la antigüedad rodeado del paisaje pedregoso y soleado donde habían florecido sus ideas me pareció genial.

George Berkeley makes the case that all our knowledge of the world comes to us through our senses, so in the end all we've really got is this sense data inside our heads. We cannot claim that is a chair out there, only that we have some chair sense data in our minds. So it is impossible to claim that the chair is anything more than a bunch of sensory experiences that we cobble together in our minds and call a "chair.

It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that." —THOMAS NAGEL, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER (1937–), ETHICIST AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHER

I live with the fact that I don't know if there really is any meaningful cosmic order and, God knows, that is a continual frustration. But I don't understand why it should be any more frustrating to know that there is a grand design but I am unable to understand it. In both cases, I am in the cosmic dark.

I hope there is no God" passage, Nagel wrote that "[I] am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers." I, too, know a great number of very bright and knowledgeable people who are believers. It sometimes makes me wonder if the skeptics have it backward: maybe I am just not wise enough to be a believer.

Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system." —WILLIAM JAMES, AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER

Maybe Francis Bacon had it wrong—at least in Ayer's case. Instead of finding meaning in religion as the result of studying philosophy in depth, Ayer found that meaning by not thinking like a philosopher at all for a few divine moments.

In the past hundred years, since Logical Positivists like Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer have argued that the idea of a rational basis for ethics is as impossible as a rational basis for the existence of God—or of the Tooth Fairy

To my surprise, I find the most relevant commentary on a marriage that continues into the sunset years comes from the radical German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, in an atypically practical frame of mind, wrote, 'When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everthing else in marriage is transitory.

This, in the end, is the prime purpose of a philosophy: to give us lucid ways to think about the world and how to live in it.

I wonder if I have a problem. I definitely have a tendency to seek spiritual inspiration from super-rational thinkers rather than from rabbis and priests and theologians.

The meaning of life is not something we look for, it is something we create.

When all is said and done, this Existentialist precept resonates with me more than any other philosophy of life I know. The idea that life's meaning is not something to look for but something to create myself feels right to me. In fact, it seems absolutely essential.

I still take great pleasure in playing around with philosophical questions, the ones that [Bertrand] Russell is the first to admit have no unequivocal answers. . . . I guess this quality makes me a Cerebral Hedonist, although some would say it makes me a mental masochist.

The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy." You have to love those words "very miserable"; Schopenhauer could not be content with simply saying "unhappy" as Epicurus did.

Ad hominem: An abbreviation for argumentum ad hominem, meaning an argument against an idea or statement based on the character of the person who authored it. It is sometimes used to discredit a philosophy of life proclaimed by someone who does not live up to it himself, as in, "He talks the talk, but he doesn't walk the walk, so I'm not listening to his advice.

Epicurus said something similar when he wrote, "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

Now, some people will bemoan this fact, wag their fingers in your direction, and tell you sternly that you should live every minute of your life as though it were your last, which only goes to show that some people would spend their final ten minutes giving other people dumb advice. The

The historian Will Durant performed the remarkable feat of summarizing Kant's point in a single sentence: 'The world as we know it is a construction, a finished product, almost–one might say–a manufactured article, to which the mind contributes as much by its moulding forms as the thing contributes by its stimuli.