Quotes about Philosophy

God is either good and not all powerful, or He is powerful and not all good. You can't have it both ways.

Seventeenth-century deism constructed a God who created a universe and then walked away to leave it running according to its natural laws and man's devices. Many people today are practical deists.

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I though, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anesthetic?

Don't think about that either. If you don't think about it, it doesn't exist. The hell it doesn't. But that's the system I'm going on, he thought.

What a person thinks is determined by how a person thinks. This is true whether the conclusion at which a person arrives is accurate, safe, and profitable — or stupid and vicious.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number; for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

I believe that this is the key, the principle itself is the key to conservatism. Because in many ways if you do not have a principled base you do not have policy and if you do not have policy in many ways you do not have an ideology.