Quotes about Philosophy

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

I have no mission. No one has.

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.