Quotes About Philosophy

Man warring on himself an old tale is; But Man discovering the source of all his sorrow in himself, Finding his left hand and his right Are similar sons, are children fighting In the porchyards of the void?!

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.

If we were magically shrunk and put into someone's brain while she was thinking, we would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers! —G. W. LEIBNIZ (1646–1716)

philosopher Kurt Gödel reached a similar conclusion in his 1931 "incompleteness theorem." We are thus left with the perplexing situation of being able to define a problem, to prove that a unique answer exists, and yet know that the answer can never be found.

Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: "We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods." —HUSTON SMITH16 Some philosophers hold

One view is that philosophy is a kind of halfway house for questions that have not yet yielded to the scientific method.

Fredkin believes that the universe is very literally a computer and that it is being used by someone, or something, to solve a problem. It sounds like a good-news/bad-news joke: the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion decimal places.

A machine is as distinctively and brilliantly and expressively human as a violin sonata or a theorem in Euclid. —GREGORY VLASTOS

A primary role of traditional religion is deathist rationalization—that is, rationalizing the tragedy of death as a good thing.

Dreams are real while they last; can we say more of life? —HAVELOCK ELLIS

Dicen que todo lo que sube baja y dicen que todo puede reemplazarse y en general dicen todo tipo de tonterías.

Wittgenstein dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction, and never find anything simple enough.

Wittgenstein's language has the singularly rare quality of being both colloquial and painstakingly precise.

Logic is not a science that discovers truths; it is just a collection of tautologies.

Wittgenstein was very much against women's suffrage for no particular reason except that 'all women he knows are such idiots'.

Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity.

What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.

Tautologies, according to Wittgenstein, are senseless, because, as they do not picture the world, they lack sense.

Wittgenstein calls tautologies and contradictions 'pseudo-propositions'; they are not real propositions, because real propositions can be either true or false.

meaningful propositions are limited to picturing states of affairs in the world, and value

While I would not claim that Muir's "God" (or his "Mother Nature") is neatly synonymous with China's "Tao," it seems clear that what Muir is getting at when he uses the various terms examined above is well within the variety of concepts that have been advanced to describe "the Tao

There is no answer. It's okay. But even if it wasn't okay, what am I supposed to do?