Philosophical Reflections Quotes

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

I have withdrawn not only from men, but from affairs, especially my own affairs; I am working for later generations, writing down some ideas that may be of assistance to them.

I was fascinated by quotations and lists. And then I noticed that other people were fascinated by quotations and lists: people as different as Borges and Walter Benjamin, Novalis and Godard.

'My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.

Walden - all his books, indeed - are packed with subtle, conflicting, and very fruitful discoveries. They are not written to prove something in the end. They are written as the Indians turn down twigs to mark their path through the forest. He cuts his way through life as if no one had ever taken that road before, leaving these signs for those who come after, should they care to see which way he went.

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.

The reflection and experience of many years have led me to consider the holy writings not only as the most authentic and instructive in themselves, but as the clue to all other history. They tell us what man is, and they alone tell us why he is what he is: a contradictory creature that seeing and approving of what is good, pursues and performs what is evil. All of private and public life is there displayed. ... From the same pure fountain of wisdom we learn that vice destroys freedom; that arbitrary power is founded on public immorality.

Literature is the province of imagination, and stories, in whatever guise, are meditations on life.

We stand in need of such reflections to comfort us for the loss of some illustrious characters, which in our eyes might have seemed the most worthy of the heavenly present. The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human natures.

If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.

When I consider the wonderful activity of the mind, so great a memory of what is past, and such a capacity of penetrating into the future: when I behold such a number of arts and sciences, and such a multitude of discoveries hence arising,--I believe and am firmly persuaded that a nature which contains so many things within itself cannot be mortal.

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

I never think about issues when I'm working on a novel. Issues are things that happen to people in sufficient numbers to elicit widespread attention; in other words, they're just life happening. That's what I think about: life, and telling a story.

On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of images before me rise, Accompanied by feelings of delight Pure, or with no unpleasing sadness mixed.

I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.

'Jitterbug Perfume' is one of my favorite books.

Think about the books that you were reading at a certain crisis in your life, what you were reading, and that's because you needed them to nourish your alma.

To the scientist Nature is a storehouse of facts, laws, processes; to the artist she is a storehouse of pictures; to the poet she is a storehouse of images, fancies, a source of inspiration; to the moralist she is a storehouse of precepts and parables; to all she may be a source of knowledge and joy.

In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.