Quotes About Philosophy

If I used to ask myself, over a coffin: "What good did it do the occupant to be born?," I now put the same question about anyone alive.

Le degré d'adversité dans lequel nous vivons peut être jugé selon le rôle que joue le soleil dans nos préoccupations, selon notre ingratitude. Car nous commençons à penser à partir du moment où nous ne montrons plus la moindre reconnaissance envers lui.

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me

The emphasis on birth is no more than the craving for the insoluble carried to the point of insanity.

We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of birth

Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

Overrun on every side, stoicism, faithful to its principles, had the elegance to die without a struggle.

The flayed man as theoretician of detachment...The convulsionary as skeptic...

If disgust for the world conferred sanctity of itself, I fail to see how I could avoid canonization.

No need to elaborate works

Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.

The great systems are actually no more than brilliant tautologies. What advantage is it to know that the nature of being consists in the 'will to live,' in 'idea,' or in the whim of God or of Chemistry? A mere proliferation of words, subtle displacements of meanings. What is loathes the verbal embrace, and our innermost experience reveals us nothing beyond the privileged and inexpressible moment. Moreover, Being itself is only a pretension of Nothingness.

Philosophy is taught only in the agora, in a garden, or at home. The lecture chair is the grave of philosophy, the death of any living thought, the dais is the mind in mourning.

Since there can only be a limited number of ways to face the ultimate problems, the mind is limited in its expansion by that natural boundary which is the essential, by that impossibility of indefinitely multiplying the capital difficulties: history is solely concerned with changing the aspect of a sum of questions and solutions.

The philosophers' originality comes down to inverting terms. Since there are only three or four attitudes by which to confront the world – and about as many ways of dying – the nuances which multiply and diversify them derive from no more than the choice of words, bereft of any metaphysical range. We are engulfed in a pleonastic universe, in which the questions and answers amount to the same thing.

To exempt themselves from action, oppressed peoples entrust themselves to "fate," a negative salvation as well as a means of interpreting events: a philosophy of history for daily use, a determinist vision on an effective basis, a metaphysic of circumstance . . .

BaÅŸlang?çta ÅŸeylerden kaçmak için düÅŸünürüz; sonra fazla uzaÄŸa gittiÄŸimizde, kaç???m?z?n piÅŸmanl???yla kendimizi mahvetmek için...

Bütün hakikatler bize kar??d?r. Ama yaÅŸamaya devam ederiz çünkü onlar? olduklar? gibi kabulleniriz, çünkü onlardan sonuç ç?karmay? reddederiz.

Man gives off a special odor: of all the animals, he alone smells of the corpse.

De ceux qui ne diffusent pas autour d'eux un relent d'échec, on peut difficilement dire qu'ils ont vécu. La décomposition est la seule trace que laisse la marche de la vie, cet étrange pourrissement de la matière. Création et destruction sont les différentes directions d'une même substance qui s'affirme en s'effilochant.

Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods.

A word, once dissected, no longer signifies anything, is nothing. Like a body that, after the autopsy, is less than a corpse.

Quand on sait de façon absolue que tout est irréel, on ne voit vraiment pas pourquoi on se fatiguerait à le prouver.

my nature forces me to drift, to remain forever in the equivocal