Quotes About Philosophy

In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.

the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. ... in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest.

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.

In the long run we are all dead

You cannot become what you already are.

All the things we say. And how little of all the words even touch any reality. Or perhaps they all do if we knew it

I picked up a secondhand copy—$7.99—and read the text on the back: "Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

solid midwestern pragmatism. Circle of life and all that.

I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas.

For those who seek to understand it, death is a highly creative force. The highest spiritual values of life can originate from the thought and study of death.

True existence is only defined by rationality.

The Greeks said grandly in their tragic phrase, 'Let no one be called happy till his death' to which I would add, 'Let no one, till his death, be called unhappy.'

A harmless life, she called a virtuous life, A quiet life, which was not life at all . . .

So it is with all beauty," she said cheerfully. "Every glory also shits.

A world of complexity in that syllable.

I don't believe in God. She drops by once in a while and we argue about it. Now can you stop yammering on with your questions long enough for us to steal a few horses?

Sweet death in a vacuum, why can't anybody be uncomplicatedly evil in real life? Or uncomplicatedly good? Why are we all such a twist of good and bad decisions, selfishness and self-justification, altruism and desire?

Machiavelli's outlook had not been so much simplistic as limited by his times.

You aren't you. You aren't the you you were this morning. Your consciousness provides a semblance of continuity, but if you've been an infinite number between then and now.

He tried to feel the meaning of the words, speak them with passion nonetheless. If this was what he was inspired to, then he would not believe he had been inspired wrong. And it wrong to simply intone the Scholar-God's arguments. They must be…internalized. Considered. Spoken as if they lived and breathed and were each day argued anew, not as if they lay dead and dusty in some tomb.