All Quotes By Tag: Philosophy

“The menu is not the meal.”

“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

“She said, “It’s not life or death, the labyrinth.””Um, okay. So what is it?””Suffering,” she said. “Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That’s the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?… Nothing’s wrong. But there’s always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there’s a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It’s the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.”

“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”

“It takes three to make love, not two: you, your spouse, and God. Without God people only succeed in bringing out the worst in one another. Lovers who have nothing else to do but love each other soon find there is nothing else. Without a central loyalty life is unfinished.”

“Know thyself? If I knew myself, I’d run away.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.”

“I don’t want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.”

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”