Quotes About Philosophy

In the answer to one of these ancient philosophical questions, it turns out that nobody's idea of green is the same as anybody else's idea of green, at least on a species-level-but at least the physics for comparing them all is pretty straightforward.

Am I just a sufficiently complicated and randomized construct that I adequately simulate intelligence? Or am I just a mock-up?

I'm not a religious person, though I dabbled for a while.

Strike two for Utopia. The problem with the damned things always comes when you try to introduce actual people into your philosophical constructs.

Even if one were tempted to literary interpretations such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female --such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off in that watery, dazzling dialectic.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster

As for Thomas, the longer he lived, the less he cared for the world.

I often ask the question: Is it impossible to have a simple life? The world is not simple, Claire said. The world is not simple. Joe repeated the phrase like the line of a great poem.

By the way, I've decided there's no such thing as a simple life. It's futile to even pursue one.

Where there's life there's hope,' he said sternly. 'Where there's life there's pain,' Oliver responded, but opened his eyes.

I shrugged, annoyed. How could I expect him to understand the philosophers I read? I expected his derision. And that was why I tried to avoid conversations about my research, I thought with triumphant self-pity. That was why I was less and less able to have conversations with people outside of my profession. I felt miserable, but also satisfied at having my rightness proven.

If you think this life is all there is," he said, "then self-sacrifice must seem to you sheer insanity. If you do not think so then it is only common sense. It all depends on your point of view." (Hilary Eliot to David Eliot, Chapter 9)

He was a convinced but hardworked rationalist, always hard at it re-convincing himself of his convictions.

Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.

Nothing of this world is not in God. Substance is not the despised materiality of bodies that must be separated from God; it is God, God under the attribute of extension or materiality. Descartes is thus mistaken, according to Spinoza, in defining matter as extension, for matter must necessarily have a conceptual equivalent, an idea, not in opposition to extension but as one of the attributes of substance.

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species at that.

He always -- or always tried -- to do things from larger principles, not out of what he felt about people, or any particular people, but what he thought people ought to feel about -- humanity. He wasn't really interested in people singly or personally.

There is no God. Wait. I take that back, there is a God. There must be. The universe is just too perverse -- there must be an idiosyncratic mind at the helm.

Xas found himself saying, 'There really isn't any afterlife, is there?' 'Are you asking the Governor of God's prison whether he actually

is "the denial of humanity's special status.

I like to think or say, some madness there.

The problem is simply finding the right person. Ask Plato. Just make sure she finishes your thoughts and you finish hers. That's all you need.

Too bad, how sad, life's a bitch and then you die.

When I'd asked her about what she might like to happen after she died, she said, "I plan to die on trash night, so I can be put out in a Hefty bag." Also, she was a cheapskate: She disapproved of spending on the dead what could go to the living.