Quotes About Philosophy

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

If there were no God, we would have to invent one to keep people sane."*

When they go fishing, it is not really fish they are after. It is a philosophic meditation.

Their assemblies had taught the Athenians how to discuss all matters openly, with arguments for and against. This was good training in learning how to think.

The difference between Socrates and Jesus is that no one had ever been put to death in Socrates' name. And that is because Socrates' ideas were never made law. Law, in whatever name, protects privilege.

I asked this question: How can I think about my brain when it's my brain doing the thinking? So is this brain pretending to be me thinking about it?

El abismo de dos mundos incomunicables se abre entre el hombre que tiene el sentimiento de la muerte y el que no lo tiene; sin embargo, los dos mueren; pero uno ignora su muerte, el otro la sabe; el uno no muere más que un instante, el otro no cesa de morir…

The history of ideas is the history of the grudges of solitary men.

And who was ever bold enough to do nothing because every action is senseless in infinity?

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a Saint Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

Haven't people learnned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

O que torna os maus poetas ainda piores é o facto de apenas lerem poetas (tal como os maus filósofos apenas lêem filósofos), quando eles tirariam um proveito bem maior de um livro de botânica ou de geologia. Só nos enriquecemos se frequentarmos disciplinas afastadas da nossa. Isto só é verdade, claro está, nos domínios em que grassa o eu.

Por muito que me esforce, não consigo desprezar todos esses séculos durante os quais nos dedicámos unicamente a dar uma última demão na definição de Deus.

Why fear the nothing that is in store for us when it is no different from the nothing that preceded us?

La noia è pensiero in germe

I'd far rather leave a thought behind me than a child. Other people can have children.

People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.

The Garden of Eden," pursued Mr. Emerson, still descending, "which you place in the past, is really yet to come. We shall enter it when we no longer despise our bodies.

I have always been like the Greeks and didn't know.

They too entered the world of dreams- that world in which a third of each man's life is spent, and which is thought by some pessimists to be a premonition of eternity.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve — help thou my unbelief.

The atheist is nearer the Kingdom of Heaven than the hellenist.

You do admit that, if wealth was divided up equally, in a few years there would be rich and poor again just the same. The hard-working man would come to the top, the wastrel sink to the bottom. - Every one admits that. - Your Socialists don't. - My Socialists do. Yours mayn't; but I strongly suspect yours of being not Socialists, but ninepins, which you have constructed for your own amusement. I can't imagine any living creature who would bowl over quite so easily.

We know that we come from the winds, and that we shall return to them; that all life is perhaps a knot, a tangle, a blemish in the eternal smoothness.