Quotes about Philosophy

I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.

Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls... saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

A being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist.

Do not believe yourself healthy. Immortality is health; this life is a long sickness.

If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.

After all, if no one is happy who does not have what he wants and if the skeptics are always seeking the truth, but do not find it, they cannot be happy. Furthermore, the skeptics claim that their wise man is happy, and yet he cannot be happy since he does not have what he wants.

How, then, does an order of causes which is certain to the foreknowledge of God necessitate that there should be nothing which is dependent on our wills, when our wills themselves have a very important place in the order of causes?

But what shall men do who cannot find anything wise to say, because they are interpreting foolish things?

That death is not to be judged an evil which is the end of a good life; for death becomes evil only by the retribution which follows it.