Quotes About Philosophy

I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?

Good luck "You will be the better for it," he returned. "I believe I've allus been the better for any trouble as ever I had to go through with. I couldn't quite say the same for every bit of good luck I had; leastways, I consider trouble the best luck a man can have." Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, ch. 33

To be, or not to be, that is the Question:

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

The only good human being is a dead one.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, I'm a free man in here - he tapped his forehead - and you're all right.

Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?

Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.

Philosophically, Communism and Anarchism are poles apart. Practically—i.e. in the form of society aimed at—the difference is mainly one of emphasis, but it is quite irreconcilable. The Communist's emphasis is always on centralism and efficiency, the Anarchist's on liberty and equality.

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

I said. 'It seems to me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing from that moment.' 'No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, 'I'm a free man in HERE''—he tapped his forehead—'and you're all right.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.