Philosophy quotes

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Your philosophy determines whether you will go for the disciplines or continue the errors.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature’s way.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever – this is a somewhat new kind of religion.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Nature does nothing in vain.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.

Religions get lost as people do.

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

A man’s felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessing of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

The way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Science is but an image of the truth.

Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness… and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

Only the ideas that we really live have any value.

I think the brain is essentially a computer and consciousness is like a computer program. It will cease to run when the computer is turned off. Theoretically, it could be re-created on a neural network, but that would be very difficult, as it would require all one’s memories.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

What’s the good of drawing in the next breath if all you do is let it out and draw in another?

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.

For my own part, I would rather excel in knowledge of the highest secrets of philosophy than in arms.

Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man’s resources?

Nothing cannot exist forever.

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.