All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“What is left when honor is lost?”

“The philosopher is a person who refuses no pleasures which do not produce greater sorrows, and who knows how to create new ones.”

“Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’dVanity makes beauty contemptibleWisdom is more valuable than riches.”

“If you’ve a notion of what man’s heart is, wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this ‘awful’ part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb…But man’s heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man’s efforts at order an attempt to still man’s fear of himself?”

“It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.”

“In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. … Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man.’ … The verdict of the coroner’s inquest had been that Adrian Flinn (22) had killed himself ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed.’ … The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide’s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner?”

“One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone.”

“It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.”

“What matters creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?”

“If chance be the Father of all flesh, Disaster is his rainbow in the sky, And when you hear State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School! It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.”

“He was still thoughtful. ‘Do you think any of us ever really knows anyone?’ ‘Philosophy, Lord Dryden? And yet it’s daylight and everyone is still sober.”

“In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die. If enlightenment were created in such a way, there would always be a possibility of ego reasserting itself, causing a return to the confused state. Enlightenment is permanent because we have not produced it; we have merely discovered it.”

“When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.”

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

“Love gives you eyes.”