Quotes about Philosophy

Let us see rather that like Janus—or better, like Yama, the Brahmin god of death—religion has two faces, one very friendly, one very gloomy...

I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.

The past and the future (considered apart from the consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and the present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them.

Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing remains to him but abandonment to boredom.

A man cannot serve two masters: so it is either reason or the scriptures. - On Religion

the ancient wisdom of the Indian philosophers declares, "It is Mâyâ, the veil of deception, which blinds the eyes of mortals, and makes them behold a world of which they cannot say either that it is or that it is not: for it is like a dream; it is like the sunshine on the sand which the traveller takes from afar for water, or the stray piece of rope he mistakes for a snake.

The cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation, and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity.... All laughter then is occasioned by a paradox.... This, briefly stated, is the true explanation of the ludicrous.

To talk of rational beings apart from man is as if we attempted to talk of heavy beings apart from bodies.

I have been pursuing my own train of thought for more than thirty years, undisturbed by all this, just because it is what I must do, and I could not do otherwise, out of an instinctive drive which is nonetheless supported by the confidence that what is thought truly and what throws light on obscurity will be grasped at some point by another thinking mind.XX

The actual facts of morality are too much on my side for me to fear that my theory can ever be replaced or upset by any other.

everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives.

The highest, i.e., the most general concepts, are the poorest; ultimately these are just empty shells, as, e.g., being, essence, thing, becoming, ect. - incidentally, whatever could philosophical systems produce when they are merely spun out of these same concepts and have as their matter only such empty shells of thought? They must be infinitely empty and poor, and therefore, turn out to be tedious and suffocating.