Quotes About Philosophy

I mistrust all Systematisers and I avoid them — the will to a System is a lack of integrity.

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness with which you should be cleansed

When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond"—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether.

But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

The night is also a sun.

Wherever life and knowledge seemed to contradict each other, there was never any serious struggle: in such cases, denial and doubt amounted to madness.

Where there have been powerful governments, societies, religions, public opinions, in short wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force it way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart.

Cinismul este singura form? prin care sufletele obiÅŸnuite acced la ceea ce se numeÅŸte onestitate; iar omul superior, aflându-se în prezenta cinismului, fie el mai grosolan sau mai rafinat, trebuie s?-ÅŸi ciuleasc? urechile ÅŸi s? se felicite de fiece dat? când chiar în faÅ£a lui prinde glas bufonul cel neruÅŸinat sau satirul ÅŸtiinÅ£ific.

Of what use is a book that never transports us beyond all books

The Good Person of today is incapable of approaching anything except in a dishonest way–but with innocence, a true blue-eyed virtuously mendacious way. These Good People are ruined: they cannot stand a single truth about Man.

I transform myself to fast: my today refutes my yesterday.

The Greeks are interesting and extremely important because they reared such a vast number of great individuals. How was this possible? This question is one which ought to be studied

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in the truth, and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes about it too humanely—il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien—I wager he finds nothing!

L'ateismo, per me, non è un risultato, e tanto meno un avvenimento - come tale non lo conosco: io lo intendo per istinto. Sono troppo curioso, troppo problematico, troppo tracotante, perché possa piacermi una risposta grossolana. Dio è una risposta grossolana, un'indelicatezza verso noi pensatori - in fondo è solo un grossolano divieto che ci viene fatto: non dovete pensare!

This workshop where ideals are manufactured--it seems to me it stinks of so many lies

The tragic artist is not a pessimist — it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian.

The great problems are to be encountered in the street.

Error has turned animals into men; might truth be capable of turning man into an animal again?

Aren't we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn't empty space breathing at us?

We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.

Amo os que não procuram por detrás das estrelas uma razão para morrer e oferecer-se em sacrifício, mas se sacrificam pela terra, para que a terra pertença um dia ao Super-homem.

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.