I studied philosophy, religious studies, and English. My training was writing four full-length novels and hiring an editor to tear them apart. I had enough money to do that, and then rewriting and rewriting and rewriting.
We are good to others only because we think that that is, or will be, good for us.
This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief –like a whisper of wind–when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.
Music is … A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy
You can pray and fight at the same time, Corporal. Especially if you learn how before things get rough. It’s important to have a philosophy of life . . . and of death.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.
Quote words that affirmall men and women are yourbrothers and sisters.
THE PRESOCRATIC PROBLEM[all snap flags]Parmenides named his gun The Hot Power of the Stars. His gun was one, uncreated, imperishable, timeless, changeless, perfect, spherical. Spherical was the problem.
Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.
I never quite understood the question that says, is the glass half empty or half full? What’s the difference? Eventually it’ll end up empty and in the trash.
I don’t think the real America is in New York or on the Pacific Coast; personally, I like the Middle West much better, places like North and South Dakota, Minneapolis and Saint Paul. There, I think, are the true Americans
I’m always looking for something new: a new inspiration, a new philosophy, a new way to look at something, new talent.
Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.
People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.
My library is segregated into philosophy, history, general reading, travel, my own books… and only three cookbooks.
Men are generally right in what they affirm and wrong in what they deny. What we deny is generally something that lies outside our experience, and about which we can therefore say nothing.
Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn’t someone, somewhere, laughing?
Identifying the flaw in the US philosophical roots requires that we move beyond the intellectual and emotional climate in which the Constitution was conceived and adopted. The meanings of concepts and words change with use, and even the Supreme Court has admitted that the original perspective of the American social contract has been altered by the passage of time.
We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous.
Islam deals not only with what man must and must not do, but also with what he needs to know. In other words, Islam is both a way of acting and doing things and a way of knowing.
My philosophy is never start talking about ‘if,’ ‘and,’ ‘but’ or the past, because 90 percent of what follows will be negative.
Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else.
Our philosophy is to attract top talent and incentivise them to succeed. We have some of the top talent in the entire industry.
It’s a kind of philosophy of my own life, to create the energy enough to keep on going.
The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
I desire to live in peace and to continue the life I have begun under the motto ‘to live well you must live unseen
The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense.
Once your soul is awakened, you never return to the sleepwalking state of mind. Some people become complacent in life. They are just going through the motions and not aware of truth. Seek the knowledge, wisdom, and the understandings that vivify your existence.
Evolution is a bankrupt speculative philosophy, not a scientific fact.
There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.
Plus d’un qui n’a pu liberer ses propres chaines a su pourtant en liberer son ami.
Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.
Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.
The statement ‘There is nothing more American than an Indian’ happens to be a multidimensional paradox. Try and not say too many of those. That might open your mind to ideas that could cause sanity point loss.
Is the world really beautified by the fact that man thinks it beautiful? He has humanized it, that is all.
There’s a huge swath of humanity that has developed verbal abilities to extract resources from guilt-ridden people.They used to be priests, and now they’re leftists.
Philosophy would render us entirely Pyrrhonian, were not nature too strong for it.
Mixing old wine with new wine is stupidity, but mixing old wisdom with new wisdom is maturity.
When someone asks ‘what’s the use of philosophy?’ the reply must be aggressive, since the question tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power.
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
There is no such thing as objectivity. We are all just interpreting signals from the universe and trying to make sense of them. Dim, shaky, weak, static-y little signals that only hint at the complexity of a universe we cannot begin to understand.
We have the tools, but we have to learn how to use them. That is my political philosophy.
It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit
She sent me a sunny smile, and what a smile, George; it was a smile that could have melted the whole world, because if the whole world had seen it, it would have had the power to stop all wars and hatred on the face of the planet, or at lease there would have been some long ceasefires.
We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you.
I earned my Ph.D. in philosophy, and one of my specializations was the logic and mathematics of game theory. I’ve also got a degree in drama, so I know about stories, characterizations, plot arcs, and the like. Lots of game designers can do one or the other: I’ve got the skills for both.
Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.
I have a philosophy that has guided me throughout all of my scientific career, and that is, I think of myself as a fairly thoughtful person. I don’t go into projects impetuously, and I try to select important problems.
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.
If I were to adopt pure mechanism as a philosophy, there would be no way I could choose to be a scholar.
It was only after two years’ work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn’t realise I knew that I said, ‘I’m a writer now.’ The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That’s really what writing is—an intense form of thought.
In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it’s all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean.
People say everybody has a book inside them, so why not make your life a great story?