Philosophical Quotes - Page 49

The patient must minister to himself

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano!

I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.

The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.

Norman Mailer decocts matters of the first philosophical magnitude from an examination of his own ordure, and I am not talking about his books.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

A Finnan haddock has a relish of a peculiar and delicate flavour, inimitable on any other coast than that of Aberdeenshire. Some of our Edinburgh philosophers tried to produce their equal in vain. I was one of a party at dinner where the philosophical haddocks were placed in competition with the genuine Finnan fish. These were served round without distinguishing whence they came; but only one gentleman out of twelve present espoused the cause of philosophy.

A fault is fostered by concealment.

Veiling truth in mystery.

Perhaps even these things, one day, will be pleasing to remember.

Cease to think that the decrees of the gods can be changed by prayers.

The medicine increases the disease.

Persevere and preserve yourselves for better circumstances.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end-by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.

O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts!

Natura nihil agit frustra [Nature does nothing in vain] is the only indisputible axiom in philosophy. There are no grotesques in nature; not any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unncecessary spaces.

All the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly.

By daily dying, I have come to be.

We have to reconcile ourselves with philosophical questions in every field. Every field should be open to inquiry and knowledge.

I am not too accusatorial or defensive by nature. I have always been kind of philosophical about it, remembering that it is just a game. People take these things too seriously.

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level—but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.