The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens – tax livestock – labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters.
A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.
Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.
The world's a mean place. It's unfair, then it's fair. It's hateful, then it's loving. It's a very peculiar place on philosophical and metaphysical and religious levels.
Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years.
I always see that there's a - from a philosophical point of view - there's the appearance of things that everybody wants you to think is happening, then there's the reality underneath it.
To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
The great philosopher, Aristotle had this to say in regards to criticism. “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.
When it comes to the real operational issues that govern our understanding of physical reality, ontological definitions of classical philosophers are, in my opinion, sterile.
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.
The picture which the philosopher draws of the world is surely not one in which every stroke is necessitated by pure logic.
The world is philosophically booby-trapped; touch an interesting subject, and it just might blow up in your face. Some say it's better not to touch.
All this is applicable to the intellectual faculties of man. There is a considerable difference between one person and another as regards these faculties, as is well known to philosophers.
The more you rely on intellectual and philosophical concepts of God, the more difficult it becomes to simply experience and enjoy the wonder of God.
The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke's philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.
My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.
Philosophers have a long tradition of marrying stupid women, from Socrates on. They think it clever.
I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavour to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God.
The philosophical point is that our happiness and wellbeing is not based on incomes rising. This is not just the wisdom of sages but of ordinary people. Prosperity is more social and psychological: it's about identification, affiliation, participatio...
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the future is open.
