Philosophical Quotes - Page 25

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.

In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically.

In my work I now have the comfortable feeling that I am so to speak on my own ground and territory and almost certainly not competing in an anxious race and that I shall not suddenly read in the literature that someone else had done it all long ago. It is really at this point that the pleasure of research begins, when one is, so to speak, alone with nature and no longer worries about human opinions, views and demands. To put it in a way that is more learned than clear: the philological aspect drops out and only the philosophical remains.

We live in the best of all possible worlds

If you wish to be a writer, write.

What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.

true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.

Screwed-up people settle fights through violence. Screwed-up people start wars that could kill millions. Normal people settle fights through cookies, cakes, and pies. Normal people are fat.

Heterosexuality is a die-hard custom through which male-supremacist institutions insure their own perpetuity and control over us. Women are kept, maintained and contained through terror, violence, and the spray of semen...[Lesbianism is] an ideological, political and philosophical means of liberation of all women from heterosexual tyranny.

Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.

If you think a thing is impossible,you'll only make it impossible.

What orators lack in depth they make up for in length.

In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.

Compared to what we ought to be, we are half awake.

None but himself can be his parallel.

And right action is freedom From past and future also.

Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on.

We are like snails, each stuck to his own leaf.

All art is but imitation of nature.

A great mind becomes a great fortune.

We cannot pass our guardian angel's bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.