Quotes About Philosophy

The sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is (21).

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated.

Wisdom tells me I'm nothing. But love tells me I'm everything.

She imagines herself as the long-dead Descartes, staring into his fireplace and building a world in his own mind.

If a tree falls and nobody's watching, then it doesn't make a sound

Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.

I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

It's better to have a malign providence than an indifferent one.

Christianity is a high moral system based on the preaching of a destitute ascetic.

He read Adam Smith, Thomas Hobbes, and Niccolò Machiavelli.

Rousseau pensaba que era bueno estar solo a veces y que quizá nuestras naturalezas florecían con la máxima pureza en esas ocasiones.

there is a great debate in Kentucky, south of us, near Tennessee, between those who believe in free will and those who hold with predestination. I have always believed I was free.

Let's assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kind of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?

Looking around, do you see ruins? That was to be expected. He who lives in the world of words does not get along with things.

The strongest foundation we can find is the realization that there isn't a foundation.

philosopher Archie Bahm: "Nature can never be completely described, for such a description of nature would have to duplicate nature." That is, a perfect description of the universe is indistinguishable from the universe itself.

Life is but a dream, within a dream.

We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be. (Hamlet 5.2.217-224)

The world in which we live is no more real than a moon beam reflected in water drawn from the palm of the hand...

Is there such a thing as being too happy?

I think Mr. Robert Frost has a little too much time on his hands.

That may be infidel wisdom, but it is wisdom all the same.