Quotes About Philosophy

She was suggesting that I separate also from my third child. She seemed to be saying: Imma would be better off and so would you. I replied: If Imma leaves me, too, my life will no longer have meaning. But she smiled: Where is it written that lives should have meaning?

that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit—this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son—was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell.

she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to

Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It's a good sentence, she'll like it.

Where is it written that lives should have a meaning? So she began to disparage all that struggle of mine to write. She said mockingly: Is the meaning that line of black markings that look like insect shit?

Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.

Leonora is a floating leaf of paper that will combust itself

Como dice Octavio Paz, la felicidad es una sillita al sol.

epistemologist?

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

There is, in truth, no genuine confrontation between faith and law; there is no choice between them. If one starts out with a philosophy of despair and is willing to abandon life in its biological and socio­-historica1 fullness to its doom of futility and meaninglessness, one is bound to seek salvation in some otherworldly spiritual redemption. One has not chosen faith and rejected law', one has rejected life and thus needs no law.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. "Ethics" meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That's why it was called "golden," like the golden ratio.

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

How could a thirteenth-century person have written such things? If you want what visible reality can give, you are an employee. On the other hand, why couldn't Rumi have said that?

When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn't take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn't learned what I wanted to about how language worked. I hadn't learned anything at all.

The existentialists said you couldn't make decisions based on preexisting norms or codes, which were always too general for any given case. Rather, every decision you made created you. The decision (existence) comes first, and creates essence.

It seems to me that your sense of other people's awfulness might be compensating for your own sense of inferiority and fear of rejection. You rationalize the rejection of your peers by telling yourself it comes from other people's deficiencies rather than your own. They can't understand your philosophy or your ideas.

I couldn't help thinking it was wasteful for people with such good logic skills to spend so many years and so much energy learning to reconcile an old book with the way things were now. Couldn't a person just write a new book?