All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“There is much in this vision that will remind you of your mystics; yet between them and us there is far more difference than similarity, in respect both of the matter and the manner of our thought. For while they are confident that the cosmos is perfect, we are sure only that it is very beautiful. While they pass to their conclusion without the aid of intellect, we have used that staff every step of the way. Thus, even when in respect of conclusions we agree with your mystics rather than your plodding intellectuals, in respect of method we applaud most your intellectuals; for they scorned to deceive themselves with comfortable fantasies.”

“He did not wish to be divine. If there had never been a God, the emperor thought, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. This business of worship, of the abnegation of self in the face of the Almighty, was a distraction, a false trail. Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.”

“Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d’you think?”

“A false-statement requires deceit and distortion for someone to buy it, but a truthful-statement sells itself.”

“Good authors worry about genres great authors don’t.”

“Think of me as an impetuous Hegel, drunk with power, and also, regular drunk.”

“Etre dans le vent, c’est avoir le destin des feuilles mortes.”

“How could someone possibly be that beautiful? She wondered for the hundred thousandth time. What higher power orchestrated such a perfect union of genes? Who decided that one single solitary soul deserved skin like that? It was so fundamentally unfair.(Chasing Harry Winston)”

“We need to walk to know sacred places, those around us and those within. We need to walk to remember the songs.”

“As long as your ideas of what’s possible are limited by what’s actual, no other idea has a chance.”

“The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man’s true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them.”

“Personally, I prefer Stevie Wonder,” confessed the Chink, “but what the hell. Those cowgirls are always bitching because the only radio station in the area plays nothing but polkas, but I say you can dance to anything if you really feel like dancing.” To prove it, he got up and danced to the news.”

“Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being.”

“People do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.”

“the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease”