Quotes about Philosophy

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.

Philosophy began when man ate the produce of the earth and suffered indigestion.

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

Remember: Matter: how tiny your share of it. Time: how brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate: how small a role you play in it.

The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available - that is a great tradition, and it saves a lot of time in this world.

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

By the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: "Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit. God tells Job, who wants an explanation for all his troubles, "You wouldn't understand.

Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.

To a longer and worse life, a shorter and better is by all means to be preferred.