Quotes About Philosophy

I still had to invent and write a great philosophic work, which I had begun a year before, and which was called, "The Tower of Babel." I had already written five hundred pages of it, and I was still only on the Prologue! At this period my sexual anxiety disappeared almost completely, and the philosophic theories of my book took up all the room in my psychic activity.

I never took drugs, because I am drugs

Theology is ignorance with wings.

What I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives.

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.

We know enough at this moment to say that the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

I try to steer away from high metaphysical belief because I think we humans do best when we realize that we don't know all that much.

Yes, we could solve for why, but we could also eat another slice of coconut cake.

Remember this, my boy. The two greatest men who ever livied-Jesus and Socrates-were both hoboes.

Villains arise from intellectualism without spirituality: a vivid manifestation of the Antichrist. Obviously, the villain, in and for itself, is the Antichrist.

from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If": If you can meet with triumph and disaster And treat those two imposters just the same

Simpler theories may be more convenient to work with, but they are not intrinsically more probable than complex ones.

According to many philosophers, there is a purely logical reason why science will never be able to explain everything. For in order to explain something, whatever it is, we need to invoke something else. But what explains the second thing?

It must be admitted that scientists today take little interest in philosophy of science.... It is not an indication that philosophical issues are no longer relevant. Rather, it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and humanities that characterizes the modern education system.

So part of the job of philosophy of science is to question assumptions that scientists take for granted.

It has been argued that close attention to the history of science is indispensable for doing good philosophy of science.

That being said, it must be admitted that many scientists today take little interest in philosophy of science, and know little about it. While this is unfortunate, it is not an indication that philosophical issues are no longer relevant. Rather it is a consequence of the increasingly specialized nature of science, and of the polarization between the sciences and the humanities that characterizes much modern education.

We're not beginning...to...to...mean something? Mean something? You and I mean something?

Here's my life, why not, it is one, if you like, if you must, I don't say no, this evening. There has to be one, it seems, once there is speech, no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.

At no moment do I know what Im talking about, nor of whom, nor of where, nor how, nor why, but I could employ fifty wretches for this sinister operation and still be short of the fifty-first, to close the circuit, that I know, without knowing what it means.

These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere.

Nothing to be done. I'm beginning to come round to that opinion.

Anything worse than what I do, without knowing what, or why, I have never been able to conceive, and that doesnt surprise me, for I never tried. For had I been able to conceive something worse than what I had I would have known no peace until I got it, if I know anything about myself.