Quotes about Philosophy

The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms. The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.

This book is a drama whose first character is the Infinite. Man is the second.

To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

I have no mission. No one has.

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.

I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.