Selected philosophy quotes

1. When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.

2. There never was night that had no morn.

3. Autumn to winter, winter into spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall, - So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move.

4. Nothing but a speck we seem In the waste of waters round, Floating, floating like a dream, - Outward bound.

5. Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.

6. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

7. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

8. Reason gains all people by compelling none.

9. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.

10. It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of 'there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties'), thereof one must be silent. It must on the contrary be named.

11. In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan's anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called 'contemporary philosophers'.

12. Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.

13. Either you can subscribe to the American creed which says that God endowed us with our rights, or you can subscribe to the abortion creed which says that those rights are the consequences of our mother's will.

14. The entire universe - for one thing - only exists in your perceptions. That's all you're gonna see of it. To all practical intents and purposes this is purely some kind of lightshow that's being put on in the kind of neurons in our brain. The whole of reality.

15. A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

16. Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

17. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

18. I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

19. Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

20. Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

21. To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it.

22. We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

23. There is not love of life without despair about life.

24. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys.

25. I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn't.

26. What must be remembered in any case is that secret complicity that joins the logical and the everyday to the tragic.

27. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

28. A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

29. There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

30. I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.

31. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

32. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

33. I agree with your remark about loving your enemy as far as actions are concerned. But for me the cognitive basis is the trust in an unrestricted causality. 'I cannot hate him, because he must do what he does.' That means for me more Spinoza than the prophets.

34. I don't believe in mathematics.

35. Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

36. Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

37. The most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile.

38. Any religion or philosophy which is not based on a respect for life is not a true religion or philosophy.

39. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation, and in every way a puzzling manifestation, of the universal will to live.

40. World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versa.

41. When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others. It is much more nearly certain that we are assembled here tonight than it is that this or that political party is in the right. Certainly there are degrees of certainty, and one should be very careful to emphasize that fact, because otherwise one is landed in an utter skepticism, and complete skepticism would, of course, be totally barren and completely useless.

42. After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.

43. Dogmatism and skepticism are both, in a sense, absolute philosophies; one is certain of knowing, the other of not knowing. What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.

44. Admiration of the proletariat, like that of dams, power stations, and aeroplanes, is part of the ideology of the machine age.

45. As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.

46. Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

47. Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner of life.

48. I was told that The Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.

49. I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.

50. I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

51. In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

52. Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don't know.

53. The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.

54. When we look at a rock what we are seeing is not the rock, but the effect of the rock upon us.

55. It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.

56. Life is everything and nothing all at once.

57. That something so obvious as the vanity of the world should be so little recognized that people find it odd and surprising to be told that it is foolish to seek greatness; that is most remarkable.

58. The two principles of truth, reason and senses, are not only both not genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and the senses are disturbed by passions, which produce false impressions.

59. Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

60. This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet.

61. Those who are clever in imagination are far more pleased with themselves than prudent men could reasonably be.

62. What amazes me the most is to see that everyone is not amazed at his own weakness.

63. What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.

64. Wisdom leads us back to childhood.

65. I read a book lately by Nietzsche and he says religion is just to dull the senses of the people. I agree.

66. We don't appreciate what we have until it's gone. Freedom is like that. It's like air. When you have it, you don't notice it.

67. Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques which serve its end.

68. Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

69. The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible.

70. The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality - to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle.

71. When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.

72. True thusness is the substance of thought, and thought is the function of true thusness. There is no thought except that of true thusness. Thusness does not move, but its motion and function are inexhaustible.

73. If there is a God, he is within. You don't ask God to give you things, you depend on God for your inner theme.

74. Nothingness cannot be defined; the softest thing cannot be snapped.

75. Out of chaos, find simplicity, From discord, find harmony.

76. The mind is like a fertile garden in which anything that is planted, flowers or weeds, will grow.

77. The possession of anything begins in the mind.

78. Reason must be the universal rule and guide; all things must be done according to reason without allowing oneself to be swayed by emotion.

79. We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.

80. I confess that Fermat's Theorem as an isolated proposition has very little interest for me, because I could easily lay down a multitude of such propositions, which one could neither prove nor dispose of.

81. There are problems to whose solution I would attach an infinitely greater importance than to those of mathematics, for example touching ethics, or our relation to God, or concerning our destiny and our future; but their solution lies wholly beyond us and completely outside the province of science.

82. A great part of its theories derives an additional charm from the peculiarity that important propositions, with the impress of simplicity on them, are often easily discovered by induction, and yet are of so profound a character that we cannot find the demonstrations till after many vain attempts; and even then, when we do succeed, it is often by some tedious and artificial process, while the simple methods may long remain concealed.

83. I mean the word proof not in the sense of the lawyers, who set two half proofs equal to a whole one, but in the sense of a mathematician, where half proof = 0, and it is demanded for proof that every doubt becomes impossible.

84. Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes.

85. When a philosopher says something that is true then it is trivial. When he says something that is not trivial then it is false.

86. We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

87. Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.

88. Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

89. A mathematician is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn't there.

90. Trifles make the sum of life.

91. Unless man have a natural bent in accordance with nature's, he has no chance of understanding nature at all.

92. I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.

93. By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

94. The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.

95. Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.

96. Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearings you conceive the objects of your conception to have. Then, your conception of those effects is the whole of your conception of the object.

97. Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.

98. If I couldn't laugh, I'd rather die.

99. After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.

100. A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.