philosophy

"The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man's opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic."

"Like all magnificent things, it's very simple."

"it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."

"Partout où il y a représentation indépendante, le spectacle se reconstitue."

"In the most general terms, the Enlightenment goes back to Plato's belief that truth and beauty and goodness are connected; that truth and beauty, disseminated widely, will sooner or later lead to goodness. (While we're making at effort at truth and goodness, beauty reminds us what we're hold out for.)"

"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are "coins"for real things."

"I grew up once, I decided never to do it again"

"What really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves, but the way in which we think about them. It is not things that disturb us, but our interpretation of their significance."

"The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it."

"Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry."

"There’s no way you can kill someone and get to the other side of the experience unchanged."

"If your doctrine changed for the better yet your character changed for the worse, you changed for the worse."

"What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness."

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

"You have made the moon,"The Jester said. "That is the moon."

"In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious."

"The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea."

"You know, if a waitress asks me if I want ketchup with my fries, I’ll reply, “No thanks, I’ll just drink water.” And that’s not just a statement about table etiquette; it’s a personal quote that accurately reflects my moral and philosophical belief system."

"Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free."

"Every form of happiness if one, every desire is driven by the same motor--by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence--and every achievement is an expression of it."