Quotes About Philosophy

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Each time I fail to think about death, I have the impression of cheating, of deceiving someone in me.

Suffering makes you live time in detail, moment after moment. Which is to say that it exists for you: over the others, the ones who don't suffer, time flows, so that they don't live in time, in fact they never have.

Between Ennui and Ecstasy unwinds our whole experience of time.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Sînt unii oameni atît de prosti, ca de le-ar aparea vreo idee la suprafata creierului ea s-ar sinucide din groaza de singuratate.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death. In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.

Nostalgia, more than anything, gives us the shudder of our own imperfection. This is why with Chopin we feel so little like gods.

We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.

For animals, life is all there is; for man, life is a question mark. An irreversible question mark, for man has never found, nor will ever find, any answers. Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.

Cât? via?? ai pus în gânduri, atâta moarte este în tine.

To accomplish nothing and die of the strain

I have never taken myself for a being. A non-citizen, a marginal type, a nothing who exists only by the excess, by the superabundance of his nothingness.

To claim you are more detached, more alien to everything than anyone, and to be merely a fanatic of indifference!

Death makes no sense except to people who have passionately loved life. How can one die without having something to part from? Detachment is a negation of both life and death. Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over life. For life is nothing but another word for this fear.

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. "What will be the use of that?" he was asked. "To know this tune before dying." If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.

I am for the most part so convinced that everything is lacking in basis, consequence, justification, that if someone dared to contradict me, even the man I most admire, he would seem to me a charlatan or a fool.

As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think.

Without the idea of suicide I would have surely killed myself.

If death had only negative aspects, dying would be an unmanageable action.

Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.