Quotes About Philosophy

Forma dat rei essentiam, materia existentiam.

Decir la verdad y después prenderse fuego. Esa es la tarea del filósofo.

What does the absolute mean? Something that is, and of which (under pain of punishment) we dare not ask further whence and why it is. A precious rarity for professors of philosophy!

No man has ever lived in the past, and none will live in the future; the present alone is the form of all life, and is its sure possession which can never be taken from it. The present always exists, together with its content. Both remain fixed without wavering, like the rainbow on the waterfall.

La soledad es la suerte de todos los espíritus excelentes

una existencia cuya verdadera valía hay que ponderar solo por la ausencia de dolor y no por la presencia de placeres y mucho menos de lujos.

Thrasymachos. Tell me now, in one word, what shall I be after my death? And mind you be clear and precise. Philalethes. All and nothing! Thrasymachos. I thought so! I gave you a problem, and you solve it by a contradiction. That's a very stale trick. Philalethes. Yes, but you raise transcendental questions, and you expect me to answer them in language that is only made for immanent knowledge. It's no wonder that a contradiction ensues.

No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject/perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea.

It is this which makes suicide easier: for the physical pain associated with it loses all significance in the eyes of one afflicted by excessive spiritual suffering.

always remember that we are in Germany where we have been able to do what would have been possible nowhere else: namely to proclaim as a great mind and profound thinker a mindless, ignorant, nonsense-spreading philosophaster who, through unprecedented, hollow verbiage, thoroughly and permanently disorganizes their brains. I mean our dear Hegel. And

as experience in fact shows that those purely rational characters commonly called practical philosophers (and rightly so, since real, i.e., theoretical, philosophers translate life into concepts, while they translate concepts into life) are surely the happiest

Il ne nous est pas parmi de parler de raison absolue, et il n'existe pas plus une raison en général qu'il n'existe un triangle en général, si ce n'est sous forme de raison abstraite, obtenue discursivement par la pensée et qui, à titre de représentation extraite d'une représentation, n'est qu'un moyen d'embrasser par l'esprit beaucoup de chose en une seule

there is some wisdom in taking a gloomy view, in looking upon the world as a kind of Hell, and in confining one's efforts to securing a little room that shall not be exposed to the fire.

Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.

Require the immortality of the individual is wanting to perpetuate an error to infinity.

Il mondo è una mia rappresentazione: - questa è una verità che vale in rapporto a ciascun essere vivente e conoscente, sebbene l'uomo soltanto sia capace d'accoglierla nella riflessa, astratta coscienza: e s'egli veramente fa questo, con ciò è penetrata in lui la meditazione filosofica.

purse-honora y provecho no caben en un saco.

For boundless compassion for all living beings is the firmest and most certain guarantee of moral good conduct and requires no casuistry. Whoever is filled with it will certainly injure no one, infringe on no one, do no one harm, rather, forbear everyone, forgive everyone, help everyone as much as he can, and all his actions will carry the imprint of justice and loving kindness.

Kitap zihnin en saf özü, en mükemmel suretidir.

In order not to judge unfairly one ought also to settle definitely one's expectations from this [our] point of view, and to regard, for example, even learned men, since as a rule they have become so only by the force of outward circumstances, primarily as men whom nature really intended to be tillers of the soil; indeed even professors of philosophy ought to be estimated according to this standard, and then their achievements will be found to come up to all fair expectations.

In fact, the balance wheel which maintains in motion the watch of metaphysics that never runs down, is the clear knowledge that this world's non-existence is just as possible as its existence. ?from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, p. 171

On the philosophy of the Asiatics; Asiatic Researches, vol. IV, p. 164: the fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms

Only through the pure contemplation . . . which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended; and the nature of genius consists precisely in the pre-eminent ability for such contemplation. . . . (T)his demands a complete forgetting of our own person.

Ahora una palabra para los profesores de filosofía. Siempre he admirado la sagacidad, el refinado y certero tino con que reconocieron a mi filosofía, desde el preciso instante de su aparición, como algo enteramente heterogéneo e incluso peligroso para su propio afán o, para decirlo popularmente, como algo que no encaja entre sus baratijas.