Quotes About Philosophy

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy, then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.' 

Our way–the Western Way–has always been a work in progress. Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.

Don't make a religion of reason and logic. Because in the passage of time reason may fail you and when it does, you may find yourself taking refuge in madness.

Was this what he believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the dispair inside him, and it had nothing to do with the desair finally, because the despair wasn't beautiful, and a beauty then was a horrid irony?

we are the sum of all we've seen and all we've appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you'd read. You were the sum and the fount of what you'd cherished and chosen to abide and all you had loved.

To die or not to die, that is the question; it is nobler to live in torment and rage than not to live at all?

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us. I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.

how do you go on breathing and moving and doing things when you know there is no explanation?

History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution ever been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has. Yes, Marius said. Exactly. Simplicity and brutality are synonymous in philosophy and in actions. It is brutal what you propose!

Because if it's really true that there's no order, then anything can happen to us. Anything at all. There's no real natural law, no right and wrong that's immutable, and the world is suddenly a savage place where any number of things can go wrong.

I mean it's a concept born out of moral idiocy, this idea of love!

What makes you think anyone has a destiny? We do what we do and we die.

The big problem is not How to explain the existence of evil in this world. It's How to explain the existence of good.

I've thought it from time to time myself. Stupidly simple. There has to be something to all this. There has to be! So many missing pieces. The more you consider it, the more atheists begin to sound like religious fanatics. But I think it's a delusion. It is all process and nothing more.

The great adventure of our lives. What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? And what is 'the end of the world' except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself?

Symphony of malice, symphony of madness coming through the walls, philosophy straining to contain the ghastly images, the torture, to surround it with language Ã¢â'¬Â¦

can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness.

So there it is finally," I said. "The whole philosophy—and the whole is founded upon a lie. And you cower like peasants, in hell already by your own choosing, enchained more surely than the lowest mortal, and you wish to punish us because we do not? Follow our examples because we do not!

I can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness.

What am I? Do I live? Or am I walking always in death, forever in love with time?

In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.