Quotes about Philosophy

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle.

There was something called Christianity.

I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price?

I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs," the writer and philosopher recollected. "Those folds in the trousers ? what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel ? how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.

Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seems to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt.

You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seem to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgment or to feel doubt.

He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons — that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

The right to the pursuit of happiness is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.

Books, he said—books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world.

All too many Christians have behaved as though the devil were a first principle, on the same footing as god. They have paid more attention to evil and the problem of its eradication than to good and the methods by which individual goodness may be deepened, and the sum of goodness increased.

I'm feeling miserable . . . There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy ? only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth.