pondering existence Quotes

Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.

Live the questions now.

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'm contemplating thinking about thinking...but....it's overrated - just get another drink in!

Life is only what you wonder. Day is light as your brightest dream.

Whether we will philosophize or we won't philosophize, we must philosophize.

One can do without solutions. Only the questions matter. We may share them or turn away from them.

One of the underlying things I like to do in books, is just say, stop and look at this for a moment. Not that you've got to believe that Jesus was real, or not to believe in God, but the belief that it isn't just happenstance.

To live without philosophizing is in truth the same as keeping the eyes closed without attempting to open them.

As I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, or which [his family] profoundly disapproved. Everytime the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, "What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind." After some fifty or sixty repititions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into.

When one begins to reflect on philosophy—then philosophy seems to us to be everything, like God, and love. It is a mystical, highly potent, penetrating idea—which ceaselessly drives us inward in all directions. The decision to do philosophy—to seek philosophy is the act of self-liberation—the thrust toward ourselves.

If I just got up in the morning and had no place to go and was retired or something, I would be sitting there and be thinking, "Gee, what is the purpose of life? Why are we all finite? Why do we get old and die? Is there nothing out there? Why is it so tragic? Why do our loved ones perish? Why do we generate?" Who wants to think about that stuff?

How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.

I know a lot of people who are philosophers and they sit by the river and talk about what that underwater world might look like. And I'll say 'Dive in, man, and go see it. Swim around. You'll be okay.

I always have been introspective, since I was a little kid, since I could remember, I was sitting in a closet trying to write out the meaning of the universe. That's been my whole life.

He sat a long time and he thought about his life and how little of it he could ever have foreseen and he wondered for all his will and all his intent how much of it was his doing.

He that will often put eternity and the world before him, and who will dare to look steadfastly at both of them, will find that the more often he contemplates them, the former will grow greater, and the latter less.

The time for thinkers has come.

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers.