Philosophical Quotes - Page 9

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts.

Leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

The envious person grows lean with the fatness of their neighbor.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

It's very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them.

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.

Very little of the great cruelty shown by men can really be attributed to cruel instinct. Most of it comes from thoughtlessness or inherited habit. The roots of cruelty, therefore, are not so much strong as widespread. But the time must come when inhumanity protected by custom and thoughtlessness will succumb before humanity championed by thought. Let us work that this time may come.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Happiness lies outside yourself, is achieved through interacting with others. Self-forgetfulness should be one's goal, not self-absorption. The male, capable of only the latter, makes a virtue of an irremediable fault and sets up self-absorption, not only as a good but as a Philosophical Good.

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the 'Ghost Rider' comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn't get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening - 'How is this possible, this duality?'

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

The rich will do anything for the poor but get off their backs.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the Gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.

Whatever you do, do with all your might.

Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 153

The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.