Quotes About Philosophy

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

What are we, the inhabitants of this globe, least among the many that people infinite space? Our minds embrace infinity; the visible mechanism of our being is subject to merest accident.

There is suffering and there is joy. Your life is very short, and then you're back again for another and another, forever, unless you step off the wheel.

If you start out with a tragic view of life, then anything since is just a bonus.

If you have hitherto believed that life was one of the highest value and now see yourselves disappointed, do you at once have to reduce it to the lowest possible price?

Either one does not dream, or one does so interestingly. One should learn to spend one's waking life in the same way: not at all, or interestingly.

We want to be poets of our life first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own torment it increases its own knowledge. Did you already know that?

Thinking evil is making evil.

One pays dearly for being immortal: one must die many times during his life.

There are preachers of death: and the earth is full of those to whom desistance from life must be preached.

Human life is inexplicable, and still without meaning: a fool may decide its fate.

The hour-hand of life.

And you tell me, friends, that there is no disputing taste and tasting? But all life is a dispute over taste and tasting!

Remember that life is short and death is long.

Life had stepped into the place of theory.

..., twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.

Even if we don't have any knowledge in this life, we have and tend to rely on relevant true beliefs; and that's sufficient for inquiry.

those who deny that some being is 'contingent' should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented.

When animal rights activists or moral philosophers try to draw moral judgments about wild animal populations, they often suffer from a bad case of "Bambi Ethics" or "Bambi Environmentalism." They apply human morals to nature in a superficial way, without considering the actual ethical or environmental consequences of their actions.

Evolution is amoral. Just because something is natural doesn't make it morally good ("the naturalistic fallacy"). Conversely, just because something is morally desirable doesn't make it true ("the moralistic fallacy").

Likewise, Native American Hopi were traditionally taught by the Kachinas, spirit-like beings from other planets, who instructed them in agricultural techniques and gave them philosophical and moral guidelines that have shaped Hopi culture

That concept was dealt a crippling blow by the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who held that the mind and body were totally separate entities and should be studied separately.

Matters of the mind were the concern of religion and philosophy, according to Descartes. The body, he said, should be studied by objective, verifiable methods. To a large extent, Descartes's teaching remains the model for contemporary medical research and practice.