Quotes on Philosophy

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.

There is a truth in Schopenhauer’s view that philosophy is an organism, and that a book on philosophy, with a beginning and end, is a sort of contradiction. ... In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ‘Let’s get a rough idea’, for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads.

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

There is no such thing as education. The thing is merely a loose phrase for the passing on to others of whatever truth or virtue we happen to have ourselves. It is typical of our time that the more doubtful we are about the value of philosophy, the more certain we are about the value of education. That is to say, the more doubtful we are about whether we have any truth, the more certain we are (apparently) that we can teach it to our children.

In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.

A truce to philosophy!—Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. What has been, though sweet, is gone; the present is good only because it is about to change, and the to come is all my own.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another's sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.

No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.

Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.

Me, I've seen 45 years and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive.

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows.

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.