Quotes About Philosophy

Yes, the world has been different ever since Darwin. But no less exciting, instructing, or uplifting; for if we cannot find purpose in nature, we will have to define it for ourselves.

People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.

I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die - I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created-but I believe there has to be something

They're animals, all right. But why are you so goddam sure that makes us human beings?

Maybe there's a whole other universe where a square moon rises in the sky, and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything.

In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn't it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.

Faith is a great thing, and really religious people would like us to believe that faith and knowing are the same thing, but I don't believe that myself. Because there are too many different ideas on the subject. What we know is this: When we die, one of two things happens. Either our souls and thoughts somehow survive the experience of dying or they don't. If they do, that opens up every possibility you could think of. If they don't, it's just blotto. The end.

People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.

Henry Thoreau said that we don't own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it's a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.

Rationalism is the idea that we can ever understand anything about the state of being. It's a deathtrip. It always has been. . . . And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then irrationalism might very well be a lifetrip . . . at least until it proves otherwise.

When you gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also gazes into you.

I would like to believe in God," she said, "because I don't want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation—since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it's to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That's the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street.

people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain't one.

Do you believe in an afterlife? the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. I think this is it.

their respect for the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there is no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery.

The ladder had always held us before, we thought it would always hold us again, which is a philosophy that gets men and nations in trouble time after time.

It's just that if there's a God, he's doing a piss poor job.

Ka is a friend to evil as well as good. It embraces both.

Dying was a part of living. You had to keep tuning in to that if you expected to be a whole person. And if the fact of your own death was hard to understand, at least it wasn't impossible to accept.

The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatist and the romantic.

If it happens, God lets it happen, and when we say 'I don't understand,' God replies, 'I don't care.

The poet Edgar Allan Poe described the false awakening phenomenon long before Carl Jung was born. He wrote, 'All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.' Have I answered your question?

Do you believe in an afterlife?" the gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate. Brown nodded. "I think this is it.

Once you eliminate the natural, whatever remains must be supernatural?