Philosophy Quotes - Page 95

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.

Philosophies fall away like sand, and creeds follow on another like the withered leaves of Autumn.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.

I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism ... for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygiene, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe.

There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.

We must strive to encourage East and West not only to move towards each other but also to encourage them to find a new philosophy, a philosophy which will serve as a tool determining the future of Planet Earth - our common and only shelter.

Esoteric philosophy teaches that the physical form, the body, of the individual is made new at birth; but the soul is ancient, the stuff of stars.

I am not sure just what Marx had in mind when he wrote that "philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Did he mean that philosophy could change the world, or that philosophers should turn to the higher priority of changing the world? If the former, then he presumably meant philosophy in a broad sense of the term, including analysis of the social order and ideas about why it should be changed, and how. In that broad sense, philosophy can play a role, indeed an essential role, in changing the world.

What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts.

Have I been wrong? Have I been wise to shut my eyes?

Life is sweet, life is also very short.

Good Governance cannot remain merely a philosophy. Concrete steps have to be taken for realizing its goals.

Men of genius are meteors destined to burn themselves out in lighting up their age.

Rights might be universal but their enforcement must be local.

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What's the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.

Philosophy is everybody's business.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

Again, both literature and philosophy work by appealing to certain reigning idols.

The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights.

Reality has always proved to be much more sophisticated and subtle than any preconceived philosophy.

I was drifting away like a drop in the ocean, and now I realize that nothing has been as beautiful as when I saw heaven's skies.