Quotes About Philosophy

No buscamos nada, salvo personas. No necesitamos otros mundos. Necesitamos espejos. No sabemos qué hacer con otros mundos. Con uno, ya nos atragantamos. Aspiramos a dar con nuestra propia e idealizada imagen.

Cercavo invano di raccogliere pensieri che scivolavano lungo un piano inclinato minacciando di precipitare, e la perdita di coscienza, l'annientamento mi parvero un'indicibile, insperabile grazia.

fascism may be defined as "a form of revolutionary ultranationalism for national rebirth that is based on a primarily vitalist philosophy, is structured on extreme elitism, mass mobilization, and the Führerprinzip, positively values violence as end as well as means and tends to normatize war and/or the military virtues."12

Postmodernism is the Enlightenment gone mad.

There's a kind of Gödel's Theorem in human affairs: Every attempt to systemize life or to govern it by a set of axioms rich enough to encompass the totality of experience leads to a contradiction.

Io non so se Dio esiste, ma se non esiste ci fa una figura migliore.

Are you, are you happy? I am today, she said. Maybe that's what really mattered? Living in the now, and all that crap about the past being over? The future hasn't happened, and today is forever? These aren't the kinds of statements that belonged beside question marks.

EL-FAYOUMY: Yes. Mother. Is there a Hell? MOTHER TERESA: I hope not, but I think so.

Buddhism, it seemed, was a rational religion, whose truth-claims could withstand the test of reason.

No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of giving more importance to a hypothetical, post-mortem existence than to this very life here and now. Moreover, the Buddhist teachings and practices that had the most impact upon me did so precisely because they heightened my sense of being fully alive in and responsive to this world.

First and foremost the Buddha taught a method ("dharma practice") rather than another "-ism." The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do.

For pragmatist philosophers such as these, a belief is valued as true because it is useful, because it works, because it brings tangible benefits to human beings and other creatures. Siddhattha Gotama's Four Noble Truths are "true" not because they correspond to something real somewhere, but because, when put into practice, they can enhance the quality of your life. In

one can either believe in rebirth or not believe in it. But there is a third alternative: that of agnosticism—to acknowledge in all honesty that one does not know. One does not have either to assert it or to deny it; one neither has to adopt the literal versions presented by tradition nor fall into the other extreme of believing that death is a final annihilatio? This, I feel, could provide a good Buddhist middle way for approaching the issue today.

Nanamoli Thera (Osbert Moore). The Life of the Buddha. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publishing Society, 1992 (1st edition 1972). Shantideva. The Bodhicaryavatara. (1) Translated from Sanskrit by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton. Oxford/New York:

All believers, by definition, must be agnostics. The moment you declare that you believe in God or the law of karma, you are acknowledging that you do not know whether they exist or not. For if you did know, you would have no need to believe. Only fools, fanatics, and omniscient beings would claim to know such things.

The Four are presented in that order because that is the order in which they occur as tasks to be performed: fully knowing suffering leads to the letting go of craving, which leads to experiencing its cessation, which leads to the cultivation of the path.

Above all, secular Buddhism is something to do, not something to believe i? This pragmatism is evident in many of the classic parables: the poisoned arrow, the city, the raft—as well as in the Buddha's presentation of the four noble truths as a range of tasks to be performed rather than a set of propositions to be affirmed.

An agnostic Buddhist would not regard the Dharma as a source of answers to questions of where we came from, where we are going, what happens after death. He would seek such knowledge in the appropriate domains: astrophysics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, etc.

The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo makes a similar point to Rorty: "We don't reach agreement when we have discovered the truth," he observes; "we say we have discovered the truth when we reach agreement.

Gotama did for the self what Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before. Gotama no more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.

If Buddhists choose to model their lives on the liberated arahant—or the idealized Mahayana bodhisattva, for that matter—rather than follow the example of Gotama, then I wonder how Buddhism will find a compelling voice to address the pressing issues of our world today.

We are a side-effect of the universe, not its central function – which seems to be to create star stuff, to form stars.

what is existence but an endless, ultimately futile delaying of the inevitable?

As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn't worth a grain of good hard fact.