Philosophical Quotes

What of Thought? The Crew had developed a kind of shorthand whereby they could set forth any visions that might come their way. Conversations at the Spoon had become little more than proper nouns, literary allusions, critical or philosophical terms linked in certain ways. Depending on how you arranged the building blocks at your disposal, you were smart or stupid. Depending on how others reacted they were In or Out. The number of blocks, however, was finite.
"Mathematically, boy," he told himself, "if nobody else original comes along, they're bound to run out of arrangements someday. What then?" What indeed. This sort of arranging and rearranging was Decadence, but the exhaustion of all possible permutations and combinations was death.
It scared Eigenvalue, sometimes. He would go in back and look at the set of dentures. Teeth and metals endure. ~ Thomas Pynchon

It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action. I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary condition of the working of the mental implement but that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, that classification is very serviceable for the practical purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my way of thinking derive from that.

I submit to you that syllogism is based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the objective reality of classification. Consequently in denying that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon things. [...] The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most part he tended to regard the idea as the something behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable number of unique realities. ~ H.G. Wells

If I could offer only one key to understanding this divine dialogue, it would be to remember that it takes place in the depths of consciousness and that Krishna is not some external being, human or superhuman, but the spark of divinity that lies at the core of the human personality. This is not literary or philosophical conjecture; Krishna says as much to Arjuna over and over: "I am the Self in the heart of every creature, Arjuna, and the beginning, middle, and end of their existence" (10:20). ~ Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

He who has seen present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all things are of one kin and of one form. ~ Marcus Aurelius

What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it. ~ Irving Kristol

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow. ~ T. S. Eliot

The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised
by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations
ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from
India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous
handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of
coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position.
You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far
would I go for a cup? ~ Jeet Thayil

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. ~ W. H. Auden

While Indian CEOs in Non-Indian companies are getting all the praise and admiration from the Indians, startups born on Indian soil remain unrecognized - this is not a matter of pride, it's a matter of shame, especially for a population whose history is replete with mathematical, scientific and philosophical achievements. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Some philosophers are drawn to the subject [of philosophy] via their interest in the nature and structure of the world external to us. Others are drawn to it by an interest in the capacities that make humans distinctive in the world. I am a philosopher of the latter sort. My work thus far has been clustered around the nexus of knowledge, communication, and human action. ~ Jason Stanley

What no one shows the ability to defend is quickly abandoned. Rational argument does not create belief, but it maintains a climate in which belief may flourish. ~ Austin Farrer

Time is the Mind of Space. ~ Samuel Alexander

It is sad that the air is the only thing we share. No matter how close we get to each other, there is always air between us. ~ Yoko Ono

We have really, that I know of, no philosophical basis for high and low. Moreover, the vegetable kingdom does not culminate, as the animal kingdom does. It is not a kingdom, but a common-wealth; a democracy, and therefore puzzling and unaccountable from the former point of view. ~ Asa Gray

Time plays no role in the life of one man - the subtle consciousness of it floating past me is more than enough. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds - what does it matter? Floating by, it rubs against my skin, face, and hair - wearing me down, yet polishing me all the while. Time is like fine grains of sand in a desert storm. At first, you don't pay any attention to it, but the more it hits you in the face, the more aware of it you become, the more annoying it gets until, one day, you find yourself suffocating. The weight of it eventually bends your spine, until you are crawling on your hands and knees, unable to stand straight. Then comes the time to crawl back into the womb, crawl inside and wait for rebirth. ~ Henry Martin

The best things in life make you sweaty. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Before all else, be armed. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

To convert somebody go and take them by the hand and guide them. ~ Thomas Aquinas

You cannot follow another's footsteps to the truth," Silette wrote. "A hand can point the way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a payless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory.
"Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues. ~ Sara Gran

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval. ~ Mark Twain

We go to school so that when we grow up we can make lots of money, and we make lots of money so we can provide for our children, and we have children to provide for our retirement (because we don't have any money left). ~ R.M. ArceJaeger

Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security ~ Bruce Schneier

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Hatreds not vowed and concealed are to be feared more than those openly declared. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities - we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities. ~ Richard Feldman

Don't believe in coincidence.
There is nothing unplanned in this universe ~ Levon Peter Poe ~ Levon Poe

What is this man ? A ball of wild snakes which seldom have peace together - so they go forth alone and seek prey in the world. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise. ~ Montesquieu

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not blue the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and the softcymballing, round the harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. ~ Herman Melville

Does it bother me that in my lifetime I'll never get to travel to the furthest reaches of The Milky Way and beyond? Hell yes it does, although Jesse, The Philosophy, and the followers of The Philosophy will be there to see it on my behalf I hope. ~ Cometan

The Greeks' Christian successors rejected the idea that the universe is governed by indifferent natural law. They also rejected the idea that humans do not hold a privileged place within that universe. And though the medieval period had no single coherent philosophical system, a common theme was that the universe is God's dollhouse, and religion a far worthier study than the phenomena of nature. Indeed, in 1277 Bishop Tempier of Paris, acting on the instructions of Pope John XXI, published a list of 219 errors or heresies that were to be condemned. Among the heresies was the idea that nature follows laws, because this conflicts with God's omnipotence. Interestingly, Pope John was killed by the effects of the law of gravity a few months later when the roof of his palace fell in on him. ~ Stephen Hawking

I really can't stomach you when you get all philosophical. ~ Maya Banks

It seems that laughter needs an echo. ~ Henri Bergson

God is a philosophical black hole – the point where reason breaks down. ~ Kedar Joshi

But, in fact, materialism is among the most problematic of philosophical standpoints, the most impoverished in its explanatory range, and among the most willful and (for want of a better word) magical in its logic, even if it has been in fashion for a couple of centuries or more. ~ David Bentley Hart

Apple's Jony Ive describes his "fanatical" approach to design in new interview ~ Jonathan Ive

You're an unusual person," she said.
"Bill didn't like you, but he never likes anything different. He's so - so prosaic. Don't you think that when a person gets older he should become - broadened in his outlook? ~ Philip K. Dick

Everything that happens, happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so. ~ Marcus Aurelius

I feel lucky, happy and philosophical about it all. ~ Greta Scacchi

Ah! yes, I know: those who see me rarely trust my word: I must look too intelligent to keep it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Natural science, economics, and politics depend on literature, philosophy, and religion for educating the imagination... we cannot oppose facts to values, but... all facts are integrated into meaningful wholes through a personal commitment to some kind of vision of how things ought to be. If this universal hermeneutic claim is true, then the shaping of our imagination through historical, philosophical, and literary texts in the humanities is indeed paramount. ~ Jens Zimmermann

Sometimes I look out the window out into the big, bright world and stare at people. Passers-by who live their ordinary lives and experience a full range of extraoridnary emotions. I stare at them for minutes, sometimes hours and then it makes me think, it makes me wonder. Are there people who are born healthy, who are born perfectly normal yet there is something wrong with them? Something nobody feels, nobody understands or questions, something that no one has ever even heard of? What if there are people among us who are capable of truly falling for someone, who are - in all biological, emotional, hormonal, chemical, philosophical senses - capable of loving someone with romantic love but no one in this wide world is capable of requiting that? Is it possible? Is it the fault of that person? Is it perhaps in the genes, the very DNA of someone? Is it perhaps destiny? And those passers-by go along happily without knowing anyone has ever asked something like this and they will probably never think about anything such because there might be only one person in this world who has to experience the feeling, the feeling that is so deeply rooted in a life alone. ~ Daniel Gyorki

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self. ~ William James

It's important to look at the big picture of life, as long as it's not through a small screen ~ Benny Bellamacina

When I was fifteen or sixteen I carried around in the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's 'Republic', front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful. How much I wanted an older person to notice me carrying it and be impressed, to pat me on the shoulder and say... I didn't know what exactly.

from: 'The Examined Life, Philosophical Meditations ~ Robert Nozick

Dynamic equivalence is a central concept in the translation theory, developed by Eugene A. Nida, which has been widely adopted by the United Bible Societies...Purporting to be an academically linguistic concept, it is in fact a sociocultural concept of communication. Its definition is essentially behavourist: determined by external forces, such as society--with strong pragmatist overtones--focusing on the reader rather than the writer. [M]ost twentieth-century American philosophical endeavours are predominantly pragmatist, dwelling in the shadows cast by William James and John Dewey. ~ J. Cammenga

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? ~ Allen Ginsberg

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions. ~ Eugene Ionesco

What is even more striking than the negational character of this political culture is the absence of robust and constructive affirmations. Vibrant cultures make space for leisure, philosophical reflection, scientific and intellectual mastery, and artistic and literary expression, among other things. Within the larger Christian community in America, one can find such vitality in pockets here and there. Yet where they do exist, they are eclipsed by the greater prominence and vast resources of the political activists and their organizations. What is more, there are few if any places in the pronouncements and actions of the Christian Right or the Christian Left (none that I could find) where these gifts are acknowledged, affirmed, or celebrated. What this means is that rather than being defined by its cultural achievements, its intellectual and artistic vitality, its service to the needs of others, Christianity is defined to the outside world by its rhetoric of resentment and the ambitions of a will in opposition to others. ~ James Davison Hunter

Lies are living beings; once they get hold of you they never let go ~ Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

His mentality was dressed up as a moral code, but when naked, was simply a preference. ~ J.S. Mason

Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with. ~ David Gilmour

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know. ~ Ted Chiang

The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God; and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leavingthe world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural Reason. ~ Thomas Hobbes

I do not want to sound cynical or condescending, but your lips are moving, your mind unbending. ~ Fakeer Ishavardas

The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations ... He does not confuse truth with plausibility ... he takes for truth what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable ... The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy. ~ Denis Diderot

I don't mind writing philosophical thoughts. If I don't want to die like one. ~ Debasish Mridha

I don't read for plot, a story 'about' this or that. There must be some kind of philosophical depth rendered into the language, something happening. ~ Rachel Kushner

Do not simply pay attention to the life, because the nature consists on different colors, if you entered into the colors they will soak you in a color which it is not your color. ~ Kamaran Ihsan Salih

To learn something new, take the path that you took yesterday. ~ John Burroughs

It's easy tae be philosophical when some other cunt's got shite fir blood. ~ Irvine Welsh

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable. ~ William James

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something."
"Well, didn't you? You were there."
"No, I didn't - no ... well, maybe I did, but it didn't feel like it."
"Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience."
"But ... but - " Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. "It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That's silly."
"Well, didn't you? ~ Robert A. Heinlein

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

You just listen to your own heart. That is your only teacher. ~ Rajneesh

Nothing sobers a wandering philosophical imagination like the thought of having a wife and children to support. ~ John Piper

Our ability to read out this sequence of our own genome has the makings of a philosophical paradox. Can an intelligent being comprehend the instructions to make itself? - John Sulston Scholars ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. ~ Victor Hugo

Men exist for the sake of one another. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature. But it is not science alone that guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments. ~ Antony Flew

A rich man's lie has more validity than a poor man's truth in a materialistc world ~ Rassool Jibraeel Snyman

All the philosophical theories that exist have been created by the mistaken dualistic minds of human beings. In the realm of philosophy, that which today is considered true, may tomorrow be proved to be false. No one can guarantee a philosophy's validity. Because of this, any intellectual way of seeing whatever is always partial and relative. The fact is that there is no truth to seek or to confirm logically; rather what one needs to do is to discover just how much the mind continually limits itself in a condition of dualism.

Dualism is the real root of our suffering and of all our conflicts. All our concepts and beliefs, no matter how profound they may seem, are like nets which trap us in dualism. When we discover our limits we have to try to overcome them, untying ourselves from whatever type of religious, political or social conviction may condition us. We have to abandon such concepts as 'enlightenment', 'the nature of the mind', and so on, until we are no longer satisfied by a merely intellectual knowledge, and until we no longer neglect to integrate our knowledge with our actual existence. ~ Namkhai Norbu

Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. ~ Carl Jung

This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown. ~ Victor Hugo

Without the quest, there can be no epiphany. ~ Constantine E. Scaros

In most things success depends on knowing how long it takes to succeed. ~ Charles De Montesquieu

In the strange dreams of man, there are stories that are unknowingly being built by them. Mine are among the billions that remain untold. ~ Brandon Benevides

No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Whether we are aware of it or not, every act of trust carries with it a shiver of fear. A favorable situation can become dangerous. Deep down we know that life is insecure and precarious. However, if we do trust, the shiver carries with it a philosophical optimism: Life, with all its traps and horrors, is good The bet is implicit in trust itself. If we could be sure of everyone and everything, trust would have no value - like money, if it were suddenly limitless, or sunshine, if there were always fine weather, or life, if we were to live forever ~ Piero Ferrucci

If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system. ~ Jacques Derrida

For men are not equal: thus speaks justice. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The human brain is hardwired to have this fundamental experience of universal consciousness, which is available to anyone from any culture, of any age, any religion, and without any philosophical predisposition. ~ John Hagelin

Do you know how a pearl comes to be?"
"Oysters make them, from a bit of sand."
"Aiyah. From a bit of sand." He rolled the pearl between his fingers. "All pearls begin as something unpleasant that the oysters cannot expel from themselves, even though they may want to. So they embrace these things that will not leave them, shaping them and smoothing away the sharp edges, until over time, they make of these unwanted things great treasures. ~ C.L. Wilson

Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Slow are the beginnings of philosophy. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I hold the view that the alchemist's hope of conjuring out of matter the philosophical gold, or the panacea, or the wonderful stone, was only in part an illusion, an effect of projection; for the rest it corresponded to certain psychic facts that are of great importance in the psychology of the unconscious. As is shown by the texts and their symbolism, the alchemist projected what I have called the process of individuation into the phenomena of chemical change. ~ Carl Jung

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men. ~ Epicurus

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. ~ T. S. Eliot

Some people, no matter how easy the path they are given on the walk of life, will find a way to mess it all up. Ray Levine was one of those people. ~ Harlan Coben

That's how the past juggles with your sanity: it makes the piranhas look like puppies. ~ Sean Aeon

Hate is bait for the devil, love is the gate to god ~ Benny Bellamacina

Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason. ~ Victor Hugo

Ultimately one loves one's desires and not that which is desired. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There is need for another logic... We need another logic solely because what is called logic is not a logic at all and has nothing in common anymore with philosophy... logic should change; logic should become philosophical! ~ Martin Heidegger

--perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low sometimes lost their humanity-- ~ Bob Shacochis

If female were working in the same proportion as men do, the level of GDP would be up 27 percent in a country like India, but also up 9 percent in Japan and up 5 percent in the United States of America. It's not just a moral issue, not just a philosophical issue. It just makes economic sense. ~ Christine Lagarde

The myriad-minded man, our, and all men's, Shakespeare, has in this piece presented us with a legitimate farce in exactest consonance with the philosophical principles and character of farce, as distinguished from comedy and from entertainments. A proper farce is mainly distinguished from comedy by the licence allowed, and even required, in the fable, in order to produce strange and laughable situations. The story need not be probable, it is enough that it is possible. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge