Quotes About Philosophy

To-morrow — oh, 'twill never be, If we should live a thousand years! Our time is all to-day, to-day, The same, though changed; and while it flies With still small voice the moments say: "To-day, to-day, be wise, be wise."

as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [...] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships.

Ockham's disposable razors

All's fair in love and dialectical materialism

Above all, the Stoics sought wisdom, a condition that I myself hope to achieve after I stop wrecking and burning things.

Any symbol system that does not encourage a transcendence becomes a prison.

two ideas, thought and speech, are indubitably blended in the term logos; and in every employment of the word, in philosophy and Scripture, both notions of thought and its outward expression are intimately connected.

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of the play, but in the course of play.

Though infinite players are strong, they are not powerful and do not attempt to become powerful.

Although infinite players choose mortality, they may not know when death comes, but we can always say of them that "they die at the right time" (Nietzsche).

It is apparent to infinite players that wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed.

Infinite players have rules, they just do not forget that rules are an expression of agreement and not a requirement for agreement.

Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of play, but in the course of play.

If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal. All the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.

The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.

Immortality is therefore the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play: It is a life one cannot live.

Historians become infinite speakers when they see that whatever begins in freedom cannot end in necessity.

The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.

For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.

So this is a fundamental problem, being out of a loop that I don't even believe in.

We live in a world shaped by the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment...[it] enlarged the scope of human freedom, prepared our minds for the scientific method, made man the measure of all things, and placed individual consent front and center on the political stage.

Moral Skepticism is the idea that there is no such thing as objective moral truth.

There used to be an intellectual class in America. . . . These people kept the world of ideas alive. But today the distinction between intellectuals and nonintellectuals doesn't make any difference; celebrity is the only standard. . . . Everybody has become a talker of cheap philosophy that anybody can pick up.