Quotes About Philosophy

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

I start thinking about life after death. I've got to quit thinking about it because it's very deep. Very deep. Sometimes you start thinking about it, and you don't feel like you want to be alive, so I don't like to get all quiet.

I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?

I hate actors who come and quote Nietzsche.

To be an Instagram model, you absolutely cannot just post pictures of yourself in a bikini for the sake of people seeing you in a bikini - even if that is exactly what you are doing. No, you need to caption these photos with an inspirational quote so that people will know that you are not just a butt, you're a gosh dang philosopher.

You may be able to read Bernard Shaw's plays, you may be able to quote Shakespeare or Voltaire or some new philosopher; but if you in yourself are not intelligent, if you are not creative, what is the point of this education?

I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.

Albert Camus's 'La Peste' - 'The Plague' - had an enormous impact on me when I read it in high school French class, and I chose my senior yearbook quote from it. In college, I wrote a philosophy class paper on Camus and Sartre, and again chose my yearbook quote from 'La Peste.'

I'm not an activist. I'm trying to get off the whole atheist racket.

The base emotions Plato banned have left a radio-active and not radiant land.

To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced.

No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.

Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.

What Shakespeare and the Greeks were able to do was radically question what it meant to be a human being.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

Actually, I never really look at myself as a real radical activist; I am more the conservative. I mean, the conservatives are trying to conserve; the radicals are destroying the planet.

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

As a natural historian, I don't believe in the consciousness of rocks or the opinions of rainbows or the convictions of slugs.

I was raised with the idea that I was born dying. That with every breath you take, you get closer to your last. It's something I've always known.

I was raised Church of England but I love the Buddhist philosophy, it's very powerful, non-violent.

I was raised on Bruce Lee.

I'm not philosophically opposed to raising the retirement age... I accept the fact that I may have to raise my retirement age for that.

I am philosophically opposed to raising the retirement age. I misspoke and said I was not philosophically opposed.