Philosophical Perspective Quotes

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken - errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs.

Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Socrates and Plato are right: whatever man does he always does well, that is, he does that which seems to him good (useful) according to the degree of his intellect, the particular standard of his reasonableness.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of ''meanings.''

Superstition sets the whole world in flames, but philosophy douses them.

The notion that human life is sacred just because it is human life is medieval.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.

If what the philosophers say be true, that all men's actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not, and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain, so likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage.

A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood... How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts - physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on - remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!

The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy.

'Emptiness' means empty of a separate self. It is full of everything, full of life. The word emptiness should not scare us. It is a wonderful word. To be empty does not mean non-existent. Emptiness is the ground of everything. Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.

Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

No one has a right to happiness.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other clause - that it must be lived forward. The more one thinks through this clause, the more one concludes that life in temporality never becomes properly understandable, simply because never at any time does one get perfect repose to take the stance - backward.

I adopted the theory of Reincarnation when I was twenty six. Religion offered nothing to the point. Even work could not give me complete satisfaction. Work is futile if we cannot utilise the experience we collect in one life in the next. When I discovered Reincarnation... time was no longer limited. I was no longer a slave to the hands of the clock... I would like to communicate to others the calmness that the long view of life gives to us.

If there's another world, he lives in bliss; if there is none, he made the best of this.

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

If life is an illusion it's a pretty painful one.

The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic.

Life is a game played on us while we are playing other games.

It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.

It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.