Philosophy Quotes

In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.

~ Chögyam Trungpa

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once someone asked me, What do you want to be your epitaph? So I said, Paulo Coelho died when he was alive.

~ Paulo Coelho

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

~ Noël Coward

There is desire in the perfect, beauty in the imperfect.Thus I lust over the flawless,and fall amorously forceless to the flawed.

~ Ilyas Kassam

At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.

~ Simone Weil

Man is an end in himself.

~ Ayn Rand

that you would not anticipate misery since the evils you dread as coming upon you may perhaps never reach you at least they are not yet come Thus some things torture us more than they ought, some before they ought and some which ought never to torture us at all. We heighten our pain either by presupposing a cause or anticipation

~ Seneca

But because me and myself, as you no doubt are well aware, we are going to die, my relation—and yours too—to the event of this text, which otherwise never quite makes it, our relation is that of a structurally posthumous necessity.Suppose, in that case, that I am not alone in my claim to know the idiomatic code (whose notion itself is already contradictory) of this event. What if somewhere, here or there, there are shares in this non-secret’s secret? Even so the scene would not be changed. The accomplices, as you are once again well aware, are also bound to die.

~ Jacques Derrida

Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace.

~ Ilyas Kassam

Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing -- by dint of ignorance and innocence -- that beneath this unbearable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way.

~ Gregory Maguire

To question reason is to trust it.

~ Mitch Stokes

An intelligent man is one who acknowledges his intelligence as that of those who surround him.

~ Ilyas Kassam

When you can't get what you want, get what you need

~ Benny Bellamacina

And still the text will remain, if it is really cryptic and parodying (and I tell you that it is so through and through. I might as well tell you since it won’t be of any help to you. Even my admission can very well be a lie because there is dissimulation only if one tells the truth, only if one tells that one is telling the truth), still the text will remain indefinitely open, cryptic and parodying.

~ Jacques Derrida

If your dreams are to hard to achieve, just achieve

~ Benny Bellamacina

My world is about stories that entertain, emotions that move, people you’ll remember, literature that matters.

~ M.g. Crisci

The Getsmart PrayerI do my laundry and you do yours,I am not in this life to listen to your ceaseless yammering,And you are not in this world for any discernable reason at all.You are you, and I am I, and I got the better deal.And if by chance we find each other, it will be unspeakably tedious.Fuck off.

~ Jon Carroll

The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.

~ Milan Kundera

Love gives you eyes.

~ Peter Kreeft

Your educators can only be your liberators.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If chance be the Father of all flesh, Disaster is his rainbow in the sky, And when you hear State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School! It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.

~ Steve Turner

He was still thoughtful. 'Do you think any of us ever really knows anyone?' 'Philosophy, Lord Dryden? And yet it's daylight and everyone is still sober.

~ Julie Anne Long

One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.

~ Marcel Proust

What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

~ Peter Kreeft

A tree's shade is worth more than the knowledge of truth, my sons, for a tree's shade is true while it lasts, and the knowledge of truth is false in its very truth. The leaves' greenness is worth more, for a right understanding, than a great thought, for the leaves, greenness is something you can show others, but you can never show them a great thought. We are born without knowing how to talk and we die without having known how to express ourselves. Our life runs its course between the silence of one who cannot speak and the silence of one who wasn't understood, and around it hovers — like a bee where there are no flowers — a useless, inscrutable destiny.

~ Fernando Pessoa

The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.

~ Noam Chomsky

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher) as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don't even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation that's superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It's a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

~ Fernando Pessoa

People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent (Both types are crawling around deep down in the rabbit's fur!)

~ Jostein Gaarder

The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.

~ Giacomo Casanova

Lifes like a painters palette, just when you've got everything worked out the colours change

~ Benny Bellamacina

What is left when honor is lost?

~ Publilius Syrus

Yesterday misspent can't be recall'dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.

~ Abraham Verghese

Visible objects therefore do not perish utterly, since nature repairs one thing from another and allows nothing to be born without the aid of another's death.

~ Titus Lucretius Carus

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb...But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself?

~ Richard Wright

Things which are accidentally the causes either of hope or fear are called good or evil omens.

~ Baruch Spinoza

FRANCISCUS: How sweetly she looks! Oh, but there's a wrinkle in her brow as deep as philosophy.

~ Thomas Middleton

What i took away from witnessing the broken climbers in Moshi was this: *Everything is easy until it isn't.*

~ Josh Gates

Sometimes the only way to succeed is to fail backwards

~ Benny Bellamacina