Quotes about Philosophy

Whether one believes in miracles or the miraculous has mostly to do with the presuppositions one brings to the subject.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

God is not a statistical truth, hence it is just as stupid to try to prove the existence of God as to deny him.

In politics as in philosophy, my tenets are few and simple. The leading one of which, and indeed that which embraces most others, is to be honest and just ourselves and to exact it from others, meddling as little as possible in their affairs where our own are not involved. If this maxim was generally adopted, wars would cease and our swords would soon be converted into reap hooks and our harvests be more peaceful, abundant, and happy.

Ideas are not intellectuals' toys: ideas have consequences, for good and for ill, in what even intellectuals sometimes call "the real world".

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

Time is an eternal guest that banquets on our ideals and bodies.

Time is an illusion-to orators.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerves give to wisdom.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone, the mind those of the past and future as well.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?