Philosophical Identity Quotes

I'm not a philosopher.

We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.

I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic'.

I hold firmly to my original views. After all I am a philosopher.

Like most people of my generation, I fell in love with the philosophy of existentialism.

When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.

I don't see myself as a philosopher. That's awfully boring.

I don't mind if other people call me an atheist, but I call myself a naturalist. Atheism doesn't tell you much about what I do believe in; the term naturalist opens up the discussion better.

The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties.

If at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?

Philosophy finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.