Quotes About Philosophy

Hobbes encouraged a new interest in human nature and a belief that governments only have the right to rule through contract.

Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) suggested that the individual just needed tranquillity and peace of mind to be happy. As a follower of Democritus, he maintained that death was nothing to fear – it was simply the inevitable melting of our souls and bodies into atoms.

All human beings are pain-pleasure organisms. Moral and political philosophy should therefore seek to increase pleasure and minimize pain. It should be democratic.

if a friendship exists only because it benefits us personally, then perhaps it's a lesser kind of relationship. Kant would say that friends have to be ends in themselves, not means. Friendship has 'intrinsic', not mere 'instrumental' worth.

The ultimate consequence of misology is a kind of self-destruction in which what is destroyed is that aspect of the self represented by active reason

The Socratic-Platonic psychê, in other words, is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters.

It's weird, you know, the way so many people accept the notion that stone is inanimate, that rock doesn't move. I mean, really, this here cliff moves me every time that I see it.

Pri?am sve ovo samo zato što verujem da se jednostavne stvari (smrt) mogu poništiti složenim strukturama (pripovedanje), iako je odavno trebalo da je jednostavnost zamršenija od svake složenosti.

Maybe we're all in somebody's dream. Maybe everything's a dream, and nothing else.

Yes. But sad's alright. Sad's just apart of everything

Sometimes she wondered about lung cancer, but on some basic, primal level she believed that she and any cancers that might grow in her system were one and the same being, and they would do her no harm. ?It was an idle, amusing thought

I'm not getting old," Harry said, "I'm already old.

The basis of any attempt to take over the world is always going to be a philosophy, and the philosophy in this case is one that has been around for centuries. It's based on the idea that the majority of the people are simply too stupid to know what's good for them, so they need a government that's going to make those decisions on their behalf. As long as there are politicians being voted into office, this philosophy is not going to die out.

There is no time in the mind,

You can cry about death and very properly so, your own as well as anybody else's. But it's inevitable, so you'd better grapple with it and cope and be aware that not only is it inevitable, but it has always been inevitable, if you see what I mean.

It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.

the semantics of words is an intellectual mess.

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

As we have seen, nobody is lucky enough not to be born, everybody is unlucky enough to have been born – and particularly bad luck it is.

Never to have been born is best But if we must see the light, the next best Is quickly returning whence we came. When youth departs, with all its follies, Who does not stagger under evils? Who escapes them? Sophocles' Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, The best would be never to have been born at all. Heinrich Heine2

On my view there is no net benefit to coming into existence and thus coming into existence is never worth its costs.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

Perhaps we would not be human if the quality of our lives were much better than it is. It does not follow that the quality of human life is good.

It is curious that while good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place