Quotes about Philosophy

But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul

See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

There are doubts, sir, which, if man have them, it is not man that can solve them.

But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise.

Even death may prove unreal at last and stoics be astounded into heaven. Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned, Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind. That like the crocus budding through the snow, that like a swimmer rising from the deep, that like a burning secret which doth go. Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep, emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea and prove that death but routs life into victory.

If the universe is created, then there must be reality beyond the universe...The Creator is the source of life and establishes its meaning and purpose....To study the origin and development of the universe is, in a sense, to investigate the basis for any meaning and purpose to life. Cosmology has deep theological and philosophical ramifications.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

The object of the superior man is truth.

The true and the approximately true are apprehended by the same faculty; it may also be noted that men have a sufficient natural instinct for what is true, and usually do arrive at the truth. Hence the man who makes a good guess at truth is likely to make a good guess at probabilities.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.