Philosophy Quotes

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.

~ Aberjhani

A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

~ Shashi Tharoor

By the time we began to understand enough about what the world to ask the right questions, our visit is over, and someone else is visiting, asking the same questions.

~ D.k. Levick

Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.

~ Clarence Jordan

If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert

~ Peter Watts

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

~ Jonathan Haidt

This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.

~ Daniel Quinn

[People] ask themselves, what is suitable for my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and percuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary in preference to what suits their own inclinations. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things that are commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own.

~ John Stuart Mill

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.

~ Slavoj Žižek

If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

~ Daniel Quinn

History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”--from Past Present and Future are One

~ Aberjhani

Death is never an excuse to stop living.

~ Catherine Johnson

I am serving the purpose for which I was designed, therefore I am satisfied with my existence.

~ Kevin J. Anderson

Every life has a destiny... the trick is to discover it before then end of your life. Otherwise, you will have too many regrets.

~ Kevin J. Anderson

We must think beyond ourselves

~ Kevin J. Anderson

[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.

~ Daniel Quinn

Nat: Maybe you broke something.Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down!Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy years later, you fall down again.

~ Herb Gardner

If the moment is everthing, then everything is time.

~ Benny Bellamacina

For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say that he has examined to the bottom all his own, or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than constrain others.

~ John Locke

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

Rien ne sert de courir il faut partir à point

~ Jean De La Fontaine

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror

~ Alasdair Macintyre

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everwhere.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

If I could put it into a very few words, dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.

~ James Hilton

I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.

~ Michael Gira

Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been proven that in order to win, you must live, but you must also allow the other player to live. Players who are too greedy will lose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction. This is what one of Taniguchi's characters says: you live, you die, these are consequences. It's a proverb for playing go, and for life.

~ Muriel Barbery

Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

~ Ayn Rand

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.

~ Robert Musil

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

~ George Eliot

Business people - Your business - is your greatest prejudice: it ties you to your locality, to the company you keep, to the inclinations you feel. Diligent in business - but indolent in spirit, content with your inadequacy, and with the cloak of duty hung over this contentment: that is how you live, that is how you want your children to live!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

When two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight; an encounter in some circumstances may be enough.

~ Hediger

The world is a garden of philosophy. God is its gardener, Man is the visitor.And any tree that does not bear fruits of philosophy either does not belong tothat garden or is yet to be grown.

~ Kedar Joshi

I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.

~ Stanley Baldwin

Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?

~ Ian Frazier

What is humor?' one of their professors had posed, and he had answered, ''nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.

~ Sena Jeter Naslund

We are the lucky ones for we shall die, as there is an infinite number of possible forms of DNA all but a few billions of which will never burst into consciousness.

~ Frank Close

Sublime natures are seldom clean!

~ Longinus

If we try to measure Now, we find it's always gone, has become part of the past.

~ Aidan Chambers

If i had it all to do again there would be more bodies.

~ Phil Baker