Quotes about Philosophy

What a person thinks is determined by how a person thinks. This is true whether the conclusion at which a person arrives is accurate, safe, and profitable — or stupid and vicious.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

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.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

I believe that this is the key, the principle itself is the key to conservatism. Because in many ways if you do not have a principled base you do not have policy and if you do not have policy in many ways you do not have an ideology.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.