Quotes About Philosophy

Unlike Marxism, the illiberal one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power, and it functions happily alongside many ideologies.

This book was not written 'so that it will not happen again', as the cliché would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again. Totalitarian philosophies have had, and will continue to have, a profound appeal to many millions of people.

You'll find a man can live without his money as merrily as a tortoise without its head, or a wasp without its body." '"But

What is God?—I cannot see Him or hear Him.—God is only an idea." '"God is Infinite Wisdom, and Power, and Goodness—and Love;

A philosophy professor at my college, whose baby became enamored of the portrait of David Hume on a Penguin paperback, had the cover laminated in plastic so her daughter could cut her teeth on the great thinker.

I have now reached the stage that I don't care much whether I live or die. The world will still keep on turning without me; what is going to happen, will happen, and anyway it's no good to resist.

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression?

The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway. I'll just let matters take their course and concentrate on studying and hope that everything will be all right in the end.

S]he believed that the Buddhists were right–that if you want, you will suffer; if you love, you will grieve. (68)

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.

The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise

My father treated them with respect and kindness, his main philosophical and spiritual position being: Don't be an asshole.

Marcus Aurelius said that we are little souls carrying around corpses.

And while people ran about proclaiming such things,] I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.

What is a man, said Athos, who has no landscape? Nothing but mirrors and tides.

am seeking perhaps what Socrates asked for in the prayer from the Phaedrus when he said, "May the outward and inward man be at one.

Plotinus was preaching the dangers of multiplicity of the world back in the third century.

Was a great enemy as much a part of a man's life as a great friend? Surely it must be. It must be the cross thread in the fabric of emotions.

not everything comes with an easy answer, or without a price.

Most people, women included, judge according to their own experience. We think what we need to think, in order to hold on to our own worldview and validate what we must believe. It is a matter of survival, although it may seem merely to be prejudice to someone else. It takes a lot of courage to turn your world upside down and start again. Most people have enough practical worries of survival not to look for philosophical ones.

I know nothing of god or the devil. I have never learned a secret nor found a cure that would damn or save my soul.