Quotes About Philosophy

Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?

Man is what he believes.

Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.

You ask What is life? That is the same as asking What is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.

If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache.... If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation.

To believe in God is not hard. Inquisitors, Biron and Arakcheev believed in Him. No, believe in man!

Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.

But perhaps the universe is suspended on the tooth of some monster.

A nadie le vino la cordura antes que la insensatez. LUCIO ANNEO SÉNECA

One of the most quoted Stoic sayings must surely be Epictetus' (which we first encountered on p. 39): 'People are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.

Chrysippus' questions might be useful. He asked: 'Is there good or bad at hand? Is it appropriate to react?' This could be supplemented with a few more, producing a kind of Chrysippan flowchart:

When planning for the future, it might be useful to follow the Stoics' suggestion of adding to our intention a tag like 'if nothing prevents' – a secular version of 'God willing

The problem with rules, says Seneca, is that 'if we give precepts for specific situations, the task will be endless'. Instead, we should be guided by philosophical principles, which are 'concise and comprehensive'.

Where Epictetus advised testing the value of things by asking whether they are in our power, Chrysippus recommended the following two questions: Is there good or bad at hand? Is it appropriate to react? For a Stoic, the answer to the first question would be yes only if it refers to our virtue. Otherwise it would always be no, because nothing external to us is truly good or bad. It follows that the answer to the second question would also be no, it is not appropriate to react.

Seneca says: 'if we are situated in the midst of a noisy city, let there be a preceptor at our side to contradict those who laud vast incomes and to praise instead the man who is wealthy on little and who measures wealth by how it is used.

Possibly, she thought, the pool of answers was limited. There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.

There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.

Das Leben besteht leider eben nur selten auch aus Leben.

Life consists of burning up questions.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

In the 1920s and 1930s Germany was the leader of the world in most areas you could name—the physical sciences, historical scholarship, music, philosophy, public education. The most sobering fact about the Holocaust is that it was there, and not in some backward, underdeveloped country, that it occurred.