Quotes About Philosophy

I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites.

People with a strong sense of being embodied creatures, rather than being bundles of appetite provided with the machinery of a body to work upon, will prove difficult to persuade in the coming century of the biotechnocrats.

To imagine the world without gods and religion is reasonable enough; to imagine mankind without them is an entirely different matter.

Fireworks: we shoot them off gaily while our dogs hide under the bed. Philosophers are dogs!

Atheism is having the weight of doubt lifted, just to be replaced with the weight of mortality.

Somethingism is better than nihilism.

No philosopher was ever apathetic. If there is no love, it is not philosophy.

If death is perfect enlightenment, life appears to be the perfect opposite.

Atheists believe simplicity is a virtue when it is precisely this that weighs so heavily on their souls.

Philosophy itself should not be merely "the pursuit of the knowledge of the truth" but should offer a practical guide for ordinary people in their everyday lives.

It was, after all, Voltaire who was reputed to be the source of the famous quip that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, if only because, so long as his wife, his tailor, his lawyer, and his servants could be persuaded to believe in the threat of punishment in an afterlife, "I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often."49

Thirdly, we have to raise human beings with a philosophy of ethics. If it's Judaism, wonderful, because it has a basic ethic. If it's Christianity, it has a basic ethic. But we have to raise people with a conscience.

Man is a creature inescapably, and often unhappily, divided; and the divisions within him recurrently impel the use of his imagination to make new syntheses. The creative consequences of his imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

Bowlby's statement that intimate attachments are the hub around which a person's life revolves, and Marris's assertion that specific relationships embody most crucially the meaning of a person's life, leave out of account not only interests, which may be crucially important, but also the need which many people feel for some scheme, religion, philosophy, or ideology which makes sense of life.

Concibe la memoria involuntaria como el lugar de la palabra verdadera, pero mientras el filósofo tropieza con esa intuición, el novelista, desplazando los contornos de la lengua, nos la hará comprender.

Although human life is priceless, we always act as if something had an even greater price than life…. But what is that something?

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Man's "progress" is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.