Quotes Tagged "philosophy"

An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.

When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.

It is evident as a matter of logic that, since they (world religions) disagree, not more than one of them can be true.

A farm regulated to production of raw commodities is not a farm at all. It is a temporary blip until the land is used up, the water polluted, the neighbors nauseated, and the air unbreathable. The farmhouse, the concrete, the machinery, and outbuildings become relics of a bygone vibrancy when another family farm moves to the city financial centers for relief.

When I was a boy, I would read those postcards and know exactly why my father was doing what he was doing: he was taking a stab at greatness, that is, if greatness is simply another word for doing something different from what you were already doing--or maybe greatness is the thing we want to have so that other people will want to have us, or maybe greatness is merely the grail for our unhappy, striving selves, the thing we think we need but don't and can't get anyway.

The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.

To establish that a rule is likely to be true, one must try to prove it false.

There is only one religion - it is a way a man dies.

Der Pragmatismus ersetzt uns alles, was früher die großen Ideen, die Ideologien und Religionen, der Glaube an Friede, Menschenrechte und Demokratie zu bieten hatten. Der Pragmatismus hält uns davon ab, zu Verbrechern zu werden, oder er macht uns zu solchen, wenn es nötig ist. Er legitimiert das Bestehen von Rechtssystem, Familie und Arbeit, er lässt uns nett sein und empfiehlt, sich ein angenehmes Äußeres zu erwerben. Nachdem wir uns aller Zwänge nach und nach erledigt haben, sorgt ein einziger Betreuer für uns: Pragmatismus.

Kein Philosoph würde ein dickes Buch schreiben, wenn er im Vornherein wüsste, auf welche Weise er später zitiert werden wird.

If disaster, so be it, they said to themselves. There was nothing to be done except what could be done. The rest -- like the salt water around them, which swallowed the snow without effort, remaining what it was implacably -- was out of their hands, beyond.

Certainty a strange Ferris wheel of a statement!

In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)

Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.

Il est le soleil qui ne se couche jamais sur l'empire de la passivité moderne. Il recouvre toute la surface du monde et baigne indéfiniment dans sa propre gloire.

Une philosophie doit etre portative.

Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält.

Rousseau identified reason as the disease for which it pretended to be the cure.

It ain't no broken.

I am philosophical Christ; crucified on the cross of ignorance for the sake of divine vanity.