Philosophy Quotes

“He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.’
‘A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,’ said the Savage promptly.
‘Quite so…”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.”
― Werner Heisenberg

“I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it and in the no less inexplicable attraction that draws us to it. War is divine by the manner in which it breaks out.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.—Why then do you try to" enlarge "your mind? Subtilize it”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live-moreover, the only one.”
― Emil Cioran

“The primitive tribes permitted far less individual freedom than does modern society. Ancient wars were committed with far less moral justification than modern ones. A technology that produces debris can find, and is finding, ways of disposing of it without ecological upset. And the schoolbook pictures of primitive man sometimes omit some of the detractions of his primitive life - the pain, the disease, famine, the hard labor needed just to stay alive. From that agony of bare existence to modern life can be soberly described only as upward progress, and the sole agent for this progress is quite clearly reason itself.”
― Robert Pirsig in 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'

“It is of course no secret to contemporary philosophers and psychologists that man himself is changing in our violent century, under the influence, of course, not only of war and revolution, but also of practically everything else that lays claim to being" modern "and" progressive. "We have already cited the most striking forms of Nihilist Vitalism, whose cumulative effect has been to uproot, disintegrate, and" mobilize "the individual, to substitute for his normal stability and rootedness a senseless quest for power and movement, and to replace normal human feeling by a nervous excitability. The work of Nihilist Realism, in practice as in theory, has been parallel and complementary to that of Vitalism: a work of standardization, specialization, simplification, mechanization, dehumanization; its effect has been to" reduce "the individual to the most" Primitive "and basic level, to make him in fact the slave of his environment, the perfect workman in Lenin's worldwide" factory.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

“Morality can provide at most only a severely limited and insufficient answer to the question of how a person should live.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love

“striid andWthdraw into yourself. Our master-reason asks no more than to act justly, and thereby to achieve calm.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.”
― C.S. Lewis

“O principal é não mentir. Quem mente para si mesmo e dá ouvido à sua própria mentira chega a tal extremo que não consegue ver nenhuma verdade em si ou naqueles que o rodeiam e, por conseguinte, perde completamente o respeito por si e pelos outros. (...) Quem mente a si próprio pode ser o primeiro a ofender-se. Às vezes, é tão agradável uma pessoa se ofender, não é verdade? O indivíduo sabe que ninguém o injuriou, que tudo não passa de simples invenção, que ele próprio mentiu e exagerou apenas para criar um quadro, para fazer de um grão uma montanha - sabe tudo e, no entanto, se ofende. Ofende-se a ponto se sentir prazer na ofensa e, desse modo, atinge o verdadeiro ódio...”
― Fiodor Dostoievski

“A truth is not necessary, because we negatively are not able to conceive the actual existence of the opposite thereof;but a truth is necessary when we positively are able to apprehend that the negation thereof includes an inevitable contradiction. It is not that that we can see how the opposite comes to be true, but it is that the opposite can not possibly be true.”
― R.L. Dabney

“Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about natural world in a decisive manner.”
― Christof Koch

“I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of" goo.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Essential Alan Watts

“Septimus has been working too hard" - that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“you got a sad story, ruth,' mimba said. 'but not sad-sad. you here with me and cato and all us together now. you have a happy-sad story. best you can get in this life is happy-sad. but you always gotta remember your own mama that birthed you. even though you only got a crumb of her story, you still got to say her name out loud. you always honor your dead, else you get trouble from them, sure.”
― Anita Diamant, The Last Days of Dogtown

“Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.”
― W.V.O. Quine

“Truth may start out timid, but it finishes bold.”
― T.J. Forrester, Miracles, Inc.: A Novel

“The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.”
― Richard Holbrooke, To End a War

“Is beauty enhanced or adulterated by utility?
”
― Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

“Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider anasceticapproach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowing of truth to the condition of purity. Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit. Only he who wants nothing for himself, who not subjectively 'interested,' can know the truth. On the other hand, an impure, selfishly corrupted will-to-pleasure destroys both resoluteness of spirit and the ability of the psyche to listen in silent attention to the language of reality.”
― Josef Pieper

“The road ahead is long and there will be many setbacks. Success is not assured… but the price of failure has never been this high.”
― Charles Lee Lesher, Shadow on the Moon

“One salutary development in recent ethical theorizing is the widespread recognition that no short argument will serve to eliminate any of the major metaethical positions. Such theories have to weave together views in semantics, epistemology, moral psychology and metaphysics. The comprehensive, holistic character of much recent theorizing suggests the futility of fastening on just a single sort of argument to refute a developed version of realism or antirealism. No one any longer thinks that ethical naturalism can be undermined in a single stroke by the open question argument, or that appeal to the descriptive semantics of moral discourse is sufficient to refute noncognitivism.”
― Russ Shafer-Landau

“Only by showing the world the cataclysmic cost of a world divided can it appreciate the wonders of life and endless possibilities of a world united.”
― William Bailey, The Great Ship of Knowledge, Vol. 1: Learning Earth's Deathly History

“[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots.”
― Stephan Delbos

“И явился Зевс Асклепию таким, каким являлся титанам в битве: огромный, со страшилищем-эгидой на груди и перуном в руке, средь громов и молний. Притихло все живое в лесах и горах Пелиона, укрываясь от блеска и грохота громовых ударов.
А мальчик-бог сказал:
- Мне не страшно. Не сжег ты меня блеском своей славы. Ты только бог и не больше. А мир огромно-большой, и мысль Хирона больше тебя, владыки Олимпа.
Удивился Молниевержец, свергающий в тартар титанов, отваге мальчика-бога.”
― Яков Голосовкер, Сказания о титанах

“Сказал Феникс:
- Ты учил нас, Хирон, что, стоя над бездной, надо бесстрашно заглядывать в ее глубь и приветствовать жизнь, что жизнь - это радость подвига. Ты учил нас, что, когда ходишь над самой черной бездной по самому краю, надо смотреть в лазурь. Теперь и ты, Хирон, бессмертный, стоишь, как и мы, герои, на краю бездны. Куда же ты смотришь?
И ответил Хирон:
- Я бессмертен, но подвержен страданию смертных. Когда чаша страданий так переполнена, что перетекает через край и в ней тонет мысль, тогда отдают эту чашу обратно жизни. Всякому страданию дано переходить в радость. Одним страданием не живут.
Смутили слова Хирона его друзей, но никто еще не понял, что задумал мудрый кентавр. Ведь он был все-таки бессмертен.
- Скажи, что ты знаешь об этом, Геракл? - спросил Феникс полубога, сына Зевса.
Ответил Геракл:
- Я не умею знать - я делаю. Я не заглядываю в бездну - я спускаюсь в нее, чтобы вынести оттуда Ужас бездны на свет дня. Я не умею ни перед чем отступать и хожу по любому краю.
Сказал тихо Хирон:
- Ты найдешь свой край, Геракл. Но слова твои меня радуют.
Тогда спросил Феникс Киклопа:
- Почему ты молчишь, Телем? И ответил Телем:
- Кто потерял небо, для того и темная земная бездна становится небом. Уже нет для меня края и глубины бездны, и мне некуда заглядывать. Я сам в бездне. Не придешь ли ты и за мной, Геракл?
Ответил Геракл:
- Приду.”
― Яков Голосовкер, Сказания о титанах