Philosophical Quotes


Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904-1906)
Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Man absent from, but entirely within, the landscape."

"The outline and the color are no longer distinct; in proportion as one paints, one outlines, and the more the color is harmonized, the more definite the outline becomes. . . .  When the color is at its richest, the form is at its most complete."

 “Cézanne said that one could see the velvetiness, the hardness, the softness and even the odor of objects.  My perception is therefore not a sum of visual, tactile, and audible givens: I perceive in a total way with my whole being; I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once.”
(Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-sense, 50)

Recent Miscellania

***Quotes by individual philosophers***

Philosophical Quotes on Art

Kant quotes

Philosophers on Tobacco

Miscellania

He had delusions of adequacy (Unknown)

Billy Wilder: He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.

Forrest Tucker: He loves nature; in spite of what it did to him

Roger Scruton
"There is no weapon in the armoury of nothingness more lethal than television."

A letter to Dear Abby:
'I am a 23 year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years.  It's getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him.'" (The Best of Dear Abby, NY: Andrews and McMeel, 1981, 242)

Kip Gary
"I am currently in Qatar and the temperature is 102. I took 102 and subtracted 32 from it, then multiplied the result by 5/9, but it was still hot. How can this be?"

J. Marshal Hendrix
Well, I stand up next to a mountain  /
And I chop it down with the edge of my hand  /
Well, I pick up all the pieces and make an island /
Might even raise a little sand /
(cf. Aristotle's four causes)

Isaac Newton: “The meaning of words is to be determined by their use.” (Principia, first Scholium to the Definitions, p. 11, trans. Motte [Berkeley: UCal Press], 1934, 1962).

 

Ben Jonson
"Language most shows a man: Speak, that I may see thee." (Timber or Discoveries)

Thomas Carlyle:
"Language is called the Garment of Thought: however, it should rather be,
Language is the Flesh-Garment, the Body, of thought." (Sartor Resartus) <>

Terence: Quot homines, tot sententiae: suo quoque mos
So many men, so many opinions; his own a law to each. (Phormio)

Noonday Demon: "As soon as we have a drug for violence, violence will become an illness."

V. Hearne, 1987, 17: Well-trained dogs are at a loss to respond to “natural bitees [who] are people whose approach to dogs are contaminated by epistemology.”

M. Twain

"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times."

1979: A propos their recent engagement on behalf of the boat people, Sartre says regretfully "On a écrit pas mal de conneries!"  To which Raymond Aron responds, "Les artistes ont des excuses que je n'ai pas."

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."--Former French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau

Samuel Johnson, explaining the Scottish Highlanders’ tendency to self-contradiction.  Without truth, no falsity:
“They have inquired and considered little, and do not always feel their own ignorance.  They are not much accustomed to be interrogated by others; and seem never to have thought of interrogating themselves; so that if they do not know what they tell to be true, they likewise do not distinctly perceive it to be false.”  (A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. R.W. Chapman [NY: Oxford UP], 106-7)
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T. Adorno (1903-69)
"Fremdwörter sind die Juden der Sprache. . . .  Sie verdienen Schutz, sie bringen etwas mit." ("Foreign words are like the Jews of language. . . .  They deserve protection, they contribute something.")

A.B. Alcott (1799-1888)
"To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant."

W. Allen (1935- )
Harry's sister: "You have no values.  Your whole life: it's nihilism, it's cynicism, it's sarcasm, and orgasm." 
Harry: "You know, in France I could run on that slogan and win."  ("Deconstructing Harry")

"I was going with a girl and we were going to get married and there was a religious conflict.  She was an atheist and I was an agnostic.  We didn't know which religion not to bring the children up in."

SPRING BULLETIN [Course Announcement]:  "PHILOSOPHY 1:  Everyone from Plato to Camus is read, and the following topics are covered:
Ethics. The categorical imperative, and six ways to make it work for you.
Aesthetics: Is art the mirror of life, or what?
Epistemology: Is knowledge knowable?  If not, how do we know this?
The Absurd: Why existence is often considered silly, particularly for men who wear
brown-and-white shoes.  Manyness and oneness are studied as they related to otherness. (Students achieving oneness will move ahead to twoness.)" (New Yorker)

"The only thing Jean-Paul Sartre and I have in common is that we're both overtippers."

"I don't know Sartre.  He's cross-eyed, that's all I know about him.  Anybody cross-eyed cannot be all that bad." (1966)

"Artistic courage is no big deal because life and death and bodily injury are not at stake.  Courage is where you work for the underground in the war.  Going onstage is not really courage, that's sort of childish courage.  The proper response to my fears is: 'What are you making such a fuss for, jerk?  Go out onstage and do it or stop complaining and go home and get another job'. . . .  My fear that I wouldn't have courage under the right circumstances always humiliates me when I'm alone with myself." (cf. Nic. Eth. III.6-9)

"On Seeing a Tree in Summer. Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable, with the possible exception of a moose singing 'Embraceable You' in spats.  Consider the leaves, so green and leafy (if not, something is wrong).  Behold how the branches reach up to heaven as if to say, 'Though I am only a branch, still I would love to collect Social Security.'"

"The first Humphrey Bogart movie I saw was The Maltese Falcon.  I was ten years old and I identified immediately with Peter Lorrie." ("My Secret Life with Bogart," Life, March 1969)

Scene cut from Annie Hall:
(Robin leaves.  Alvy checks last look at game on TV.  We see game and it is Knicks vs. a real team--)
ALVY: (mutters as he watches) Intellectuals--where does it get you--
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE: Knicks' ball--out of bounds--Jackson to Bradley--shot!  No good!  Rebound--Kierkegaard-- (Cut to set where this is happening.)
ANNOUNCER'S VOICE (cont.): Passes to Nietzsche--fast break to Kafka!  Top of the key--it's Kafka and Alvy--all alone--they're both gripped with anxiety--and guilt, and neither can shoot!  Now Earl Monroe steals it!  And the Knicks have a four-on-two--"

"The most beautiful words in the English language are not 'I love you' but 'It's benign.'"--Harry Block in Deconstructing Harry

More Allen laughs
Strung out

Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
"Sleep is inactivity of the soul insofar as it is called excellent or base, unless to some extent some movements penetrate [to our awareness], and in this way the decent person comes to have better images [in dreams] than just any random person has." (Nic. Eth. 1102b4-12, trans. Irwin)

"There is a further question about sensation, whether it is possible to perceive two things in one and the same indivisible time or not, if we assume that the stronger always overrides the weaker stimulus; which is why we do not see things presented to our eyes, if we happen to be engrossed in thought, or in a state of fear, or listening to a loud noise." (On Sense and Sensible Objects)

A. Artaud (1896–1948)
“It is not opium that makes me work, but its absence.  And in order for me to feel its absence, it must from time to time be present.”

Augustine (354-430)
"To use words to treat of words is as complicated as to rub fingers together and expect someone else to distinguish which fingers tingle with warmth and which help others to tingle." (De Magistro, sect. 14)

“Augustine claims to have seen a man who could command his bottom to break wind as often as he wished, and Vives, his commentator, caps him with another case from his own day of a man who could synchronize his blasts to the metre of verses that were read to him.” (Montaigne, Essais, I.21)

J. Austen (1775-1817)
"If any one faculty may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory.  There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.  The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient--at others, so bewildered and so weak--and at others again so tyrannic, so beyond control!  We are to be sure a miracle every way, but our powers of recollecting and forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out." (Fanny Price, Mansfield Park)

"What wild imaginations one forms, where dear self is concerned!  How sure to be mistaken!" (Persuasion)

Catherine: "To say the truth, though I am hurt and grieved, that I cannot still love her, that I am never to hear from her, perhaps never to see her again, I do not feel so very, very much afflicted as one would have thought."
Henry: "You feel, as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature.--Such feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves." (Northanger Abbey)

"Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of." (Emma)

A. J. Ayer
When asked about the failure of the Vienna Circle movement: "Well I suppose that the most important of the defects was that nearly all of it was false."

Bonaventure
Vult autem anima totum mundum describi in se. (The soul wants the whole world gathered into itself.)

R. Bultmann
"God is the uncertainty (Ungesicherheit) of the next moment which the nonbeliever experiences as having to exist (Daseinmüssen) but which the believer experiences as being allowed to be there (Daseindürfen)."

W. Churchill

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter." 

A. Damasio
The bonobos have "a wonderful personality that resembles a marriage of Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa." (Looking for Spinoza, 2003, 162)

J. D'Alembert (1717-83)
"Allez en avant, la foi vous viendra!"

C. Darwin
"Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.  Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal can blush."

G. Deleuze
Apropos of professional philosophical conferences:

"It's already hard to understand what someone is saying.  Discussion is a narcissistic exercise, where each person takes turns showing off; quite soon, no one knows what they are talking about.  The real difficulty is determining a problem to which one or another proposition responds.  But if one understands the problem someone proposes, one has no desire to discuss it with him.  Either one presents the same problem, or else one presents another and would rather move forward in this direction.  How does discussion take place if there is no common set of problems and why should discussion occur if there is one?  One always gets the solutions one deserves for the problems one presents.  Discussions represent a great deal of time lost over indeterminate problems.  Conversations are another matter.  We must have conversations.  But the littlest conversation is a highly schizophrenic exercise that takes place between individuals possessed of a common heritage and a great taste for ellipsis and short cuts.  Conversation is rest cut by long silences.  Conversations can produce ideas.  But discussion is no way part of philosophical work." (cited in Rorty and His Critics, 142)

J. Derrida (RIP 2004) “I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance.  The relation to the other—even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation—must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example.  Love is narcissistic.” [relations between people require some assurance of identity on the part of each person] (Points: Interviews 1974-1994, ed E. Weber, trans. P. Kamuf et al. Stanford UP, 1995, 199)

According to a popular 18th c. story, Descartes always traveled with a "mechanical life-sized female doll which . . . he had himself constructed to show that animals are only machines and have no souls. . . .  Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept with her encased in a trunk at his side." (S. Gaukroger, Descartes, 1995, 1)

"When we consider things in the order that corresponds to our knowledge of them, our view of them must be different from what it would be if we were speaking of them in accordance with how they exist in reality." (Descartes, Regulae, in The Phil. Writings, vol. 1, trans Cott, Stoot, and Murdoch, 1985, 44.  Technology as the form of rationality that submits beings in their totality to man as their master and possessor, by substituting another world for the world such as it is; Marion, Prolegomena, 35)

Leibniz: "Descartes had the vanity of wishing to be a solipsist." (Lachtermann, Ethics of Geometry, 129)

Original title for Descartes' Discourse on Method: "Le projet d’une science universelle qui puisse elever notre nature a son plus haut degree de perfection"

E. Dickinson
"There interposed a fly
with blue, uncertain stumbling buzz
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see."

"I heard a Fly Buzz when I Died." Sense-data as direct objects of inner sight?--Audi, 2003, 34-35; Reduction of "sapience to sentience"? Brandom, 1994)

D. Diderot (1713-84)
"Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

A deist is someone who has not lived long enough to become an atheist. (Isaacson 2003, 85)

J. Donne(1572-1631)

 "An Anatomy of the World"

            And new philosophy calls all in doubt*
            The element of fire is quite put out,**
            The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
            Can well direct him where to look for it.
            And freely men confess that this world's spent,
            When in the planets and the firmament
            They seek so many new; they see that this
            Is crumbled out again to his atomies [atoms].
            'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
            All just supply, and all relation

*new philosophy: the new science, especially that of Copernicus and Galileo
**The old concentric arrangement of the elements, with fire at the top, had been repudiated.  
(See first Goethe quote from Faust below)

Mircea Eliade
"Nonreligious man descends from homo religiosus. . . .  His formation begins with the situation assumed by his ancestors. . . .  He is an inheritor.  He cannot utterly abolish the past, since he is himself the product of his past.  To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralized the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt the opposite of an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present to him, in one form or another, ready to be actualized in his deepest being."
(The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (NY: Harper & Row, 1957), 203-4, emphasis added.)

G. Eliot (1819-80)
"Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state."

B. Franklin (1706-90)
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." (Autobiography 49)

[The only thing amusing about people who talk too much is watching two of them trying to converse]:
"The vexation they both feel is visible in their looks and gestures; you shall see them gape and stare and interrupt one another at every turn, and watch with utmost impatience for a cough or pause, when they may crowd a word in edgeways."
(Isaacson 2003, 57; contrast Alex Rieger in Taxi, who describes a boring first date thus: "I couldn't get a pause in edgewise.")

MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 111: “Conversational justice requires among other things, first that each of us speaks of candor, nor pretending or deceiving or striking attitudes, and secondly that each takes up no more time than is justified by the importance of the point that she or he has to make and the arguments necessary for making it.”

S. Freud (1856-1939)
"It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be." (Fut. Illusion, 42) 

• Compare T. Nagel, The Last Word, 130: "It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief.  It's that I hope there is no God!  I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."
• Luther: "Man is unable naturally to will that God be God; he wishes himself to be God and God not to be God."  (Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam, 1517)
  

"A single idea of general value dawned on me.  I have found, in my own case too, the phenomena of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood." (Freud to W. Fleiss, 272)

"The expectation of eternal fame was so beautiful, as was that of certain wealth, complete independence, travels, and lifting the children above the severe worries that robbed me of my youth.  Everything depended upon whether or not hysteria would come out right." (Freud to W. Fleiss, 266)

"In my private life I am a petit bourgeois. . . .  I would not like one of my sons to get a divorce or one of my daughters to have a liaison." (Freud to Marie Bonaparte, cited in Marie Bonaparte: A Life, 155)

"Left to himself, the masturbator is accustomed, whenever something happens that depresses him, to return to his convenient form of satisfaction. . . .  For sexual need, when once it has been aroused and has been satisfied for any length of time, can no longer be silenced; it can only be displaced along another path. . . .  Not everyone who has occasion to take morphia, cocaine, chloral-hydrate . . . acquires in this way an 'addiction' to them.  Closer inquiry usually shows that these narcotics are meant to serve--directly or indirectly--as a substitute for a lack of sexual satisfaction." (Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses [1898], 275-76; see next quote)

"Meine liebe Marie [Bonaparte], letter 13.VIII.1937: The moment one inquires about the sense or value of life one is sick, since objectively neither of them has any existence.  in doing so one is only admitting a surplus of unsatisfied libido, and then something else must happen, a sort of fermenting, for it to lead to grief and depression.  These explanations of mine are certainly not on a grand scale, perhaps because I am too pessimistic.  There is going through my head an advertisement which I think is the boldest and most successful American one I know of: 'Why live, when you can be buried for ten dollars?'"

"[Nietzsche] had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live.” (from E. Jones, Life and Work of S. Freud, vol II, 1953, 344.  Cf. Nietzsche below on probability of self-knowledge.)

R.Frost (1874-1963)
"Heaven gives its glimpses only to those not in position to look too close."
(from "A Passing Glimpse")

"Ah, when to the heart of man
  Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
  To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
  Of a love or a season?"
(from "Reluctance")

S. Gainsbourg
Enfin faut faire avec c'qu'on a /
Not' sale gueule nous on y peut rien /
D'ailleurs nous les affreux /
Je suis sûr que Dieu /
Nous accorde /
Un peu de sa miséricorde
("Des laids, des laids," 1979)

J.W. v. Goethe (1749-1832)
"He who cannot draw from 3,000 years is living from hand to mouth."

"Wer will das Lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben /
Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben /
Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand--/
Fehlt, leider! nur das geistige Band." (Faust I, 1936-39)
[ "To understand some living thing and to describe it /
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit; /
he then holds all its parts within his hand /
except, alas! for the spirit that bound them together."]

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp (1632)

"Er [Satan] ist schon lang' ins Fabelbuch geschrieben;
Allein die Menschen sind nichts besser dran:
Den Bösen sind sie los, die Bösen sind geblieben." (Faust I, 2507-9)
[ "[Satan] is now only mythological; /
yet mankind is no better off: the Evil One /
they may be rid of, but evil ones have still not vanished."]

G.Greene (1904-91)
"When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food."--Maurice Bendrix, The End of the Affair

"I'm not against a bit of supersitition.  It gives the people the idea that this world's not everything.  It could be the beginning of wisdom."--Crompton, The End of the Affair

N. Hawthorne (1804-1864)
"Truth often finds its way to the mind close-muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practice unconscious self-deception, during our waking moments." (from "The Birthmark," 1843)

J. G. Herder (1744-1803)
Upon hearing Kant's lectures in the early 1760s: "My soul could not be well in this realm of death, of lifeless concepts without basis and ground.  After each lecture in metaphysics I ran into the open with a poet -- or I read Rousseau or a similar writer, in order to waken and lose these impressions . . . for they hurt me." (Kuehn, 2001, p. 133)

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)
"The I is as it were the crucible and the fire which consumes the loose plurality of sense and reduces it to unity." (Logic, section 10)

"[T]he examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same thing as to know it.  But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim." (Logic, section 42n., vs. Kant/Kantians)

"I should like to say of my aspirations that I shall try to teach philosophy to speak German.  Once that is accomplished, it will be infinitely more difficult to give shallowness the appearance of profound speech."

M. Heidegger (1889-1976)
"Göttingen 1913: For a whole semester Husserl's students argued about how a mailbox looks.  Using this kind of treatment, one then moves on to talk about religious experiences as well.  If that is philosophy, then I, too, am all for dialectic." (Ontology, 86)

"The dominance of this epistemological problem [of the relation between subject and object] . . . is characteristic of a widely observed kind of activity through which academic disciplines, especially philosophy, gain a foothold in life and preserve themselves.  90% of the literature is preoccupied with ensuring that such wrongheaded problems not disappear and are confounded still more and in ever new ways.  Such literature dominates the industry--everyone sees and gauges the progress and vitality of academic disciplines with it.  Unnoticed in the midst of all this are those who quietly put a stranglehold on such pseudo-problems and see to it for those who have understood something of all this that they no longer investigate such things." (Ontology, 63, cf. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 214)

• Heidegger, GA 27, Einleitung in die Philosophie, §11: The problem of truth cannot be resolved by a “theory of knowledge,” that is by starting with the subject-object schema; “the problem of knowledge can only be clarified if it is first decided what truth is.”
• Heidegger, on the basis of a better familiarity with Kant and Nietzsche than Husserl, points to “the nonultimacy of the subject-object relation, a derivative structure rather than the one in terms of which to account ultimately for origination.” (Bruzina 2004, 103)
• 
  

“It has been said that my work is Catholic phenomenology—presumably because it is my conviction that thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus also understood something of philosophy, perhaps more than the moderns.  But the concept of a Catholic phenomenology is even more absurd than the concept of a Protestant mathematics.” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 20)

• On this point, compare Richard Rorty: “Dewey was making a moral and political point when he complained about the vested interests who hoped to perpetuate what he called the ‘epistemology industry’.  He saw this industry as Descartes and Hobbes saw scholastic philosophy: as consuming resources that, though appropriately used in a previous cultural epoch, should now be devoted to more worthwhile ends.”  (Phil. & the Mirror of Nature, 277)  Again, Rorty: 142n.10 “Renouncing empiricism will leave us in Wittgensteinian peace and Humean good spirits—able to walk away from the traditional epistemological problematic with a good conscience.”

“We will begin by fixing the preconception: philosophy is intended as something we want to appropriate originally, namely, by acquiring the basic frelation to it, the relation in which it is authentically present.  This is not the same as obtaining ‘knowledge’ of philosophy, orienting ourselves toward it, mastering it, being erudite in it.” (GA 61, 41)

“To understand means not simply to accept established knowledge, but rather to repeat primordially that which is understood in terms of one’s own situation and for that situation.”  Dilthey Jahrbuch, 1989, 239.

“Readers have taken constant offense at the violence of my interpretations.  Their allegation of violence can indeed be supported by this text.”  “In later writings, I attempted to retract the overinterpretation (Überdeutung). . . .” (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, xx, xviii)

• “Thus the fundamental intention of the present interpretation of the CPR was to make visible in this way the decisive content of this work and and thereby to bring out what Kant ‘had wanted to say.’.  …  Certainly, in order to wring from what the words say, what it is they want to say, every interpretation must necessarily use violence.. . .  [An interpretation must] risk what is always audacious, namely, entrusting itself to the concealed inner passion of a work in order to be able, through this, to place itself within the unsaid and force it into speech.” (Ibid., 141)
  

• Kant:
  “When we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writings, it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intention.” (A 314/B 370)

• "In the final hours of [Husserl's WS 1922-23] seminar, I publicly burned and destroyed the Ideas to such an extent that I dare say that the essential foundations for the whole [of my work] are now cleanly laid out.  Looking back from this vantage point to the Logical Investigations, I am now convinced that Husserl was never a philosopher, not even for one second in his life.  He becomes ever more ludicrous."     

• And: "[The lecture course Ontologie] strikes the main blows against phenomenology.  I now stand completely on my own feet. . . .  There is no chance of getting an appointment [with Husserl's help].  After I have published, my prospects will be finished.  Tthe old man will then realize that I am wringing his neck--and then the question of succeeding him is out."   

• And: "Husserl has come entirely unglued--if, that is, he ever was 'glued,' which more and more I have begun to doubt of late.  He goes from pillar to post, uttering trivialities that would make you weep.  He lives off his mission as the 'Founder of Phenomenology,' but nobody knows what that means."

H. Heine (1797- 1856)
"Zu fragmentarisch is Welt und Leben! /
Ich will mich zum deutschen Professor begeben, /
Der weiss das Leben zusammenzusetzen, /
Und er macht ein verstaendlich System daraus; /
Mit seinen Nachmützen und Schlafrockfetzen /
Stopft er die Lücken des Weltenbaus." (Buch der Lieder, Die Heimkehr, 1823-24, 58)

"Das ist die Hegelsche Philosophie, /
Das ist der Bücher tiefster Sinn! /
Ich hab' sie begriffen, weil ich gescheit, /
Und weil ich ein guter Tambour bin." (Neue Gedichte, Zeitgedichte, "Doktrin")

"Ein neues Lied, ein besseres Lied, /
O Freunde, will ich euch dichten! /
Wir wollen hier auf Erde schon /
Das Himmelreich errichten." (Deutschland: Ein Wintermaerchen, Caput I)

D. Hume (1711-1776)
"Though I threw out my speculations to entertain and employ the learned and metaphysical world, yet in other things I do not think so differently from the rest of mankind as you may imagine."

Letter to a critic in 1753: "Your severity . . . is so great, and I am so little conscious of having given any just occasion to it, that it has afforded me a hint to form a conjecture, perhaps ill grounded, concerning your person. . . .  With regard to our Philosophical systems, I suppose we are both so fixt, that there is no hope of any conversions betwixt us; and for my part, I doubt not but we shall both do as well to remain as we are."

As reported by Adam Smith: "I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire."

HH Price: "The error of being surprised at the wrong things might almost be called the Philosopher's Fallacy.  The most illustrious victim of it is perhaps Hume."

"I hate a drinking companion who never forgets.  The follies of the last debauch must be buried in eternal oblivion, in order to give full scope to the follies of the next." (Principles of Morals, sec. 4, 271)

• “Empiricism is by no means a reaction against concepts, nor a simple appeal to lived experience.  On the contrary, it undertakes the most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard.  Empiricism is a mysticism and a mathematicism of concepts.” (Gilles Deleuze, Différence et repetition, 1968, 3)

• “Unfortunately, the range of concepts that are vulnerable to the [empiricist positivist’s] knife is enormous. . . .  Empiricist pruning [cuts] the forest of meaningful concepts down to a few sorry shrubs.” (Jesse Prinz 2002, 165-66)
  

• M. Merleau-Ponty: "Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it; and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.” (Phenomenology of Perception, 28; cf. Meno 80d3-e5)

• "Tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die." (Mel Brooks)

E. Husserl (1859-1938)
"Unfortunately, it is the fate of philosophy to have to find the biggest problems in the biggest trivialities." (Hua XXIV, 150)

"Regarding the system of phenomenology--the necessary draft of the general 'map' of the transcendental continent--I have come farther; I still hope to make it to the border so that I can die in peace." (Letter, Nov. 1934, BW 7, 222)

"Pure phenomenology . . . can only be essence investigation, and not at all an investigation of being-there. . . .  For phenomenology, the singular is eternally the apeiron." (Phil. Rig. Sci. (1910), 116) 

• Cf. Merleau-Ponty: "It was [only] in his last period [of the Crisis (1936)], with its turn to history and the life-world] that Husserl himself became fully conscious of what the return to the phenomenon meant and tacitly broke with the philosophy of essences." (cited in Crisis, xxx note)
• Cf. Derrida: "Though it is constantly practiced in the Crisis . . . itself, this new access to history is never made a problem there." (cited in Crisis, xxxv)
  

"What is needed is not the insistence that one sees with his own eyes; rather it is that he not explain away under the pressure of prejudice what has been seen." (Phil. Rig. Sci., 147)

"Every philosopher, reflecting back upon the beginning of philosophy [in epistemology], must be able to find in this beginning the self-portrait of his own becoming." (Hua XXXV, 49)

"Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people." (Crisis, sect. 2)

"Psychology is the truly decisive field." (Crisis, sect. 58)

"Philosophy as science, as serious, rigorous, indeed apodictically rigorous science--the dream is over [der Traum ist ausgeträumt]." (Crisis, 389)

"I am not a typical ambitious lecturer who seeks to publish extensively!" (Letter to Brentano, 3.I.1905)

"I am in a much worse situation than you because the greatest part of my work is stuck in my manuscripts.  I almost curse my inability to bring my works to an end . . . .  Everything is in the stage of recrystallization!  Perhaps I am working, with all the humanly possible expenditure of energy, only for my posthumous works."- (Letter to Paul Natorp, 1922)

Zu den Sachen selbst: "Then don't do what you ought not to, Crito, but pay no attention to the practitioners of philosophy, whether good or bad.  Rather give serious consideration to the thing itself: if it seems to you negligible, then turn everyone from it, not just your sons.  But if it seems to you to be what I think it is, then take heart, pursue it, both you and yours, as the proverb says." (Socrates, in Plato's Euthydemus  307b-c

1920 letter to Natorp: "My philosophical effect does have something revolutionary about it: Protestants become Catholic, Catholics become Protestant . . . .  In arch-Catholic Freiburg I do not want to stand out as a corrupter of the youth, as a proselytizer, as an enemy of the Catholic Church.  That I am not.  I have not exercised the least influence on Heidegger's and Oxner's migration over to the ground of Protestantism, even though it can only be very pleasing to me as a 'non-dogmatic Protestant' and a free Christian." (Collected Works, Vol. 6, 9; Briefwechsel VII, 205-8)

• Dylan, on the Life-World: "Everything is happening by the clock. Without clocks there wouldn't be any useful idea of time. My soul is unaware of any time; only in my mind. My poor mind -- which is so bombarded with dates, calendars, and numbers -- has been deceived into believing there is such a thing as time, woe is me.  Hasn't everybody, at some point in their life, asked, "What time is it?" It's no time. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. That's what time it is....Anyway . . . we say things like, "Gee, was that a year ago?" or "Was that ten years ago?" or "Look at those fields that were so familiar to me as a child, where now skyscrapers stand." All of us can tell the story, "It was just the other day when this or that happened." That's only our minds talking."

Husserl to Fink, 1929, Briefwechsel III, 254: “I came to the conclusion that I cannot count [Being and Time] within the framework of my phenomenology, but also that to my regret I must reject it entirely as to its method and in the essentials of its content.”

Husserl to Heidegger (before he had read Being and Time): “You and I are phenomenology.” (Dorion Cairn, Conversations, 9)

• "Perhaps the most striking aspect of human oculomotor performance is its independence from stimulus variables.  By this I mean that a normal human adult can look about in his visual world and attend to whatever region catches his fancy undisturbed by the distribution of light on his retina, or, in perceptual terms, the way the visual world looks at a particular moment . . . .  [A human being has] considerable freedom in directing his attention to any region without regard to the color, brightness, shape, or motion of objects within it." (Robert M. Steinmann in Eye Movements and Psychological Processes, 1976, 121-22)

"The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally type, the 'deadly respectable' type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves." (Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures 4-5)

• A. MacIntyre: “The conception of philosophy as essentially a semitechnical, quasi-scientific, autonomous enquiry to be conducted by professionalized specialists is in the end barren. . . .  The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture.” (Whose Justice?, x)

• “Modern academic philosophy turns out by and large to provide means for a more accurate and informed definition of disagreement rather than for progression toward its resolution.” (Whose Justice?, 3)

• “Contemporary analytic philosophers, who often take themselves to be representing the timeless form of practical reasoning as such, when they are in fact representing the form of practical reasoning specific to their own liberal individualist culture, confirm by their accounts that this is the general form of such practical reasoning, albeit and unsurprisingly differing among themselves over the details of how preferences are to be expressed.” (Whose Justice?, 340)

"Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it.  'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone." (Varieties, Lecture 1)

"The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. ("The Will to Believe")

"Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.  There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.  No one knows this as well as the philosopher.  He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy." (Varieties, Lecture 18)

Perception is thought and sensation fused. (quoted in Putnam 1995, 67)

T. Jefferson (1743-1826)
On NYC: "It is a cloacina of all the depravities of human nature."

M. Kundera (1929-)
"Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands.  Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. . . ." (The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes, 1988)

La Rochefoucauld (1613-80)
"Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous déplait pas." (Maximes, no. 583)

J. Lennon (1940-80)
"God is a concept by which we measure our pain." ("God")

• Husserl, Log. Inv. 6: "The object of intuition is the same as the object of the thought which fulfils itself in it and, where the fit is exact, that the object is seen as being exactly the same as it is thought or … meant.  [The concept of] identity is not first dragged in through comparative, cogitatively mediated reflection: it is there from the start as experience, as unexpressed, unconceptualized experience.”

• Compare T. Nagel, The Last Word, 130: "It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief.  It's that I hope there is no God!  I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that."

G. Marcel
"Consolation, which is a grace, is beyond all dialectics; the dialectician cannot understand it or even admit its existence, and consolation can easily become for him a mere object of derision.  And yet, in a world such as ours, when suffering surpasses all estimation, it is the one who consoles who has the last word, unless were it to come from an absolute nihilist.  Between consolation and nihilism, there is room only for conceptual games, which could not deceive the heart in any case." (The Phil. of G. Marcel, 98)

B. Marley (1945-81)
"The truth is an offense but not a sin /
Is he who laugh last, children, is he who win.”

K. Marx (1818-1883)
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. . . .  The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

    Merleau-Ponty on Marx (Ph Perc 172):
    “The act of the artist or philosopher is free, but not motiveless.  Their freedom resides in the power of equivocation .     . . or in the process of escape; it consists in appropriating a de facto situation by endowing it with a figurative             meaning beyond its real one.  Thus Marx, not content to be the son of a lawyer and student of philosophy,                 conceives his own situation as that of a ‘lower middle class intellectual’ in the perspective of the class struggle.”

• de Lubac (DG 173):  "A keen eye can still detect the 'theft of sacred things' at the source of the categories which are in appearance the most profane.  Even now, after so many changes, so many denials, negations and corruptions, the Marxist ideology is still really a parasite that draws life from the Christian substance." (See Pasolini's film "The Gospel according to Matthew")
  

"Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
To his housekeeper, who urged him to tell her his last words so she could write them down for posterity (from http://www.corsinet.com/braincandy/dying.html)

•  “I shall see to it, if I can, that my death makes no statement that my life has not made already.” (Montaigne, Essais, I.7)

M. Merleau-Ponty
"Phenomenology could never have come about before all the other philosophical efforts of the rationalist tradition, nor prior to the construction of science.  It measures the distance between our experience and this science." (The Primacy of Perception, 29)

“It as at first rather surprising to find that in this effort to link philosophy with time and history, Husserl went much further than his successors, Max Scheler and Heidegger.  They tried much more quickly than he to incorporate irrational elements, in the traditional sense of this phrase, into philosophy.  They attempted to work out an analysis not only of consciousness, the privileged domain for Husserl, but of what Scheler called ‘the logic of the heart’ and what Heidegger called ‘being in the world.’  One would therefore expect that they would be more ready to bring philosophy down into the sphere of ‘facticity,’ as Heidegger referred to it.  But in fact, when they seek to define philosophical knowledge, we find them adopting dogmatic formulae which remind us of certain earlier statements of Husserl.  They seem to see no difficulties in assuming an unconditional philosophic intuition.”

T. Merton (1915-68)
"If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision." (Thoughts in Solitude, 91)

M.d. Montaigne

“In this last scene between ourselves and death, there is no more pretence…. ‘Not till then are true words drawn up from the depths of the heart; the mask (persona) is torn off and the reality exposed.” (Essais, I.19)

“Tortoises and ostriches hatch their eggs merely by looking at them—a proof that their eyes have some ejaculative power.” (Essais, I.21)

“Philosophy’s object is to calm the tempests of the soul, to teach hunger and fever how to laugh . . . by natural and palpable arguments!” (Essais, I.26)

“It is a dangerous and serious presumption, and argues an absurd temerity, to condemn what we do not understand.” I.27

A prescient commentary on contemporary academia?

“There is more trouble in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting the things themselves, and there are more books on books than on any other subject.  We do nothing but write comments on one another.  The whole world is swarming with commentaries; of authors there is a great dearth.” (Essais, III.13)

A corrective to the one-sided, subjective treatment of expression in Husserl’s Logical Investigation I?

“A speech belongs half to the speaker, half to him who hears it.  The hearer should let the form of its delivery prepare him for its reception; as, with tennis players, the man who takes the service shifts his position and makes ready according to the movements of the striker and to the nature of the stroke.” (Essais, III.13)

“I am full of cracks.  I leak on every side.”  (Terence, Eunuchus, I.ii.25, as cited in Essais II.17)

• “Ring the bells that still can ring
  Forget your perfect offering
  There is a crack in everything
  That's how the light gets in.”—L. Cohen, “Anthem,” from The Future (1992)

R. Niebuhr (1892-1971)
"Nichts ist unglaubwürdiger als die Antwort auf eine ungestellte Frage."
["Nothing is less credible than the answer to an unposed question."]

F. Nietzsche (1844-1900)
"We Germans are Hegelians, even if there had never been a Hegel, because (in contrast to all the Latins) we instinctively ascribe to evolution a deeper meaning and higher value than we ascribe to 'what is'."

"All things considered, I could not have endured my youth without Wagner’s music. . . .  If one wants to rid oneself of an unbearable pressure, one needs hashish.  Well then, I needed Wagner. . . .  To this day I am still looking for a work that equals the dangerous fascination and the gruesome and sweet infinity of Tristan—and look in all the arts in vain.  All the strangenesses of Leonardo da Vinci emerge from their spell at the first note of Tristan.  This work is emphatically Wagner’s non plus ultra. . . .  I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life.  That in which we are related—that we have suffered more profoundly, also from each other, than men of this century are capable of suffering—will link our names again and again, eternally; and as certainly as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among Germans, just as certainly I am and always shall be."

"Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one's strength--to read a book at such a time is simply depraved!" (Ecce Homo, 253)

"How one tries to improve bad arguments--some people throw a bit of their personality after their bad arguments, as if that might straighten their paths and turn them into right and good arguments--just as a man in a bowling alley, after he has let go of the ball, still tries to direct it with his gestures." (Geneaology of Morals, 184)

“I believe only in French culture (Bildung) and consider everything else in Europe today that calls itself ‘culture’ a misunderstanding.”  (Ecce Homo, “Why I am so clever,” §3)

“The most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.”  (Ecce Homo, “Why I am so wise,” §7)

“I estimate the value of men, of races, according to the necessity by which they cannot conceive the god apart from the satyr.”  (Ecce Homo, “Why I am so clever,” §4; cf. Alcibiades' portrait of Socrates in Symposium, and J. Marshall Hendrix at Monterey Pop 1967)

“Consciousness is a surface.” (Ecce Homo, “Why I am so clever,” §9, cf. Freud)

"We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves. . . .  Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, 'Each is the farthest away from himself'--as far as ourselves are concerned, we are not knowers." 

"Every great philosophy has so far been the self-confession of its originator, a kind of unintentional, unconscious memoires." (Beyond Good and Evil, VI-2, 14)

"The proficiency of our finest scholars, their heedless industry, their heads smoking day and night, their very craftmanship: how often the real meaning of all this lies in the desire to keep something hidden from oneself!"

On foundationalism (?): “[The hermit] will doubt whether a philosopher could possibly have ‘ultimate and real opinions’, whether behind every one of his caves there is not, must not be, another deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abysmally deep ground behind every ground, under every attempt to furnish ‘grounds’.” (Beyond Good and Evil, sect. 289)

"It is not the triumph of science that characterizes our nineteenth century, but the triumph of scientific method over science." (Will to Power, sect 466)

• A. MacIntyre:  “Nietzsche in a [courageously] heroic series of acts isolated himself by ridding himself, so far as is humanly possible, of the commitments required by the virtues of acknowledged dependence.  He was then able to tell us from that new vantage point how human nature and the human condition appear from it.  And the account that he provided, item by item, stands in the starkest of oppositions to and is an inversion of the account presupposed by the practice of the virtues of acknowledged dependence.”  (Dependent Rational Animals, 162)
  

"The madman.— Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"— As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?— Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried. "I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I! All of us are his murderers! But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?" (The Gay Science, §125)

• Compare J-L. Marion's claim in Being Given that saturated phenomena "wipe away the entire [phenomenological] horizon." Keep in mind that the paradigmatic saturated phenomenon--which has an intuitive content that far surpasses our conceptual capacities to grasp it--is revelation, and the paradigmatic revelation is Revelation, as Christ, as God: as horizonless(ness).
  
• "By giving itself absolutely, the saturated phenomen also gives itself as absolute--free from any analogy with already seem, objectified experience.  It is freed because it does not depend on any horizon." (211-12)
• "The saturated phenomenon . . . is unconditioned by a horizon and irreducible to an I." (218)
• "Here the I of intentionality can neither constitute nor synthesize the intuition into an object defined by a horizon.  The synthesis--if there must be one--is accomplished without and contrary to the I, as a passive synthesis." (226)
• "[Saturated phenomena are] never constitutable as objects within a horizon and by an I." (228)
  

B. Pascal
“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.”

• Compare F. Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer: “It is not by confining one’s neighbor that one is convinced of one’s own sanity.”
• And L. Wittgenstein: "You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded."*

W. Percy (1916-90)

"The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no [bodily] connection.  It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves.  One such option is a sexual encounter. . . .  The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one's own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being.  Amazing!  Indeed the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection!" (Lost in the Cosmos, ch. 8)

"Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else--or size up Saturn--in a ten-second look?"

Lancelot (1977):

• Malebranche, a propos a recurrent Percy theme: "No, I shall not lead you into a strange country, but I shall perhaps teach you that you are strangers in your own country."
  

S. Pinker
"Unfortunately for [the theory of the human soul], brain science has shown that the mind is what the brain does.  The supposedly immaterial soul can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, turned on or off by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or a lack of oxygen.  Centuries ago it was unwise to ground morality on the dogma that the earth sat at the center of the universe.  It is just as unwise today to ground it on dogmas about souls endowed by God."  ("A Matter of Soul," Weekly Standard, 2 Feb 1998)

Plato (ca. 428-ca. 348 BCE)
"Our dreams make it clear that there is a dangerous, wild, and lawless form of desire in everyone, even in those of us who seem to be entirely moderate or measured." (Rep. 572b; see discussion of the relation of the moderate man to his dreams at 571c-572b)

"When anyone sees anywhere the written work of anyone, whether that of a lawgiver in his laws or whatever it may be in some other form, the subject treated cannot have been his most serious concern; that is, if he is himself a serious man." (Sev. Letter)

“What’s especially difficult about being ignorant is that you are content with yourself, even though you’re neither beautiful and good nor intelligent.  If you don’t think you need anything, of course you won’t want what you don’t think you need.”  (Symp. 204a)

E. Renan
"Good humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us.  I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.  We owe it to the Eternal to be virtuous; but we have the right to add to this tribute our irony as a sort of personal reprisal.  In this way we return to the right quarter jest for jest; we play the trick that has been played on us.  Saint Augustine's phrase, 'Lord, if we are deceived, it is by thee!', remains a fine one, well suited to our modern feeling.  Only we wish the Eternal to know that if we accept the fraud, we accept it knowingly and willingly.  We are resigned in advance to losing the interest on our investments of virtue, but we wish not to appear ridiculous by having counted on them too securely." (Feuilles detachees)

P. Ricoeur (1913-)
"My brain does not think, but when I am thinking something is always going on in my brain--even when I am thinking of God." (What Makes Us Think?, 40)

"Abstraitement séparées de l'expérience spirituelle qui les fonde, les valeurs sont comme des fleurs coupées dans un vase." (Du texte à l'action)

“Scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are products of the same urge. . . . Both scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are private projects which have gotten out of hand.  They are attempts to make one’s private way of giving meaning to one’s life—a way which romanticizes one’s relation to something starkly and magnificiently nonhuman, something ultimately true and real—obligatory for the general public.” (“Religious Faith…”, ch. 5 of the Cambridge Companion to William James, 1997, 92-93)

BUT: “Those who, like me, were raised atheist and now find it merely confusing to talk about God, nevertheless fluctuate between moods in which we are content with utility and moods in which we hanker after validity as well; . . . between ‘romance’ and needy, chastened humility.” (Ibid., 98)

Husserl is but "a brief and futile interruption of the Hegel-Marx-Nietzsche-Heidegger-Foucault sequence."  (Rorty and His Critics, 130)

Daniel Dennett's APA Philosophical Lexicon lists two neologisms: (Rorty and His Critics, 91)

• rorty, an incorrigible report, hence rorty, incorrigible [entry in early 1970s]
  
• a rortiori (adj.), true for even more fashionable continental reasons [entry in 1980s]
  

J.-J. Rousseau
"Since men enjoyed very great leisure, they used it to pursue many kinds of commodities unknown to their fathers; and that was the first yoke they imposed upon themselves without thinking about it, and the first source of the evils they prepared for their descendants.  For, besides their continuing thus to soften body and mind, as these commodities had lost almost all their pleasantness through habit, and as they had at the same time degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than possessing them was sweet; and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to have them." (Discourse on Inequality)

• “There is no more contemptible type of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his lif in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.  Rousseau, inflaming all the mothers of France, by his eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse their babies themselves, while he sends his own children to the foundling hospital, is the classical example of what I mean.” (W. James, Principles of Psychology, ch. 4)

B. Russell (1872-1970)
"That endless battle within me makes me like what acts without inward battling: that is why I like necessity and the laws of motion and the doings of dead matter generally.  I can't imagine God not full of conflict. . . .  So I prefer no God.  Life seems to me essentially passion, conflict, rage; moments of peace are brief and destroy themselves.  A God must be calm like Spinoza's, merely the course of nature.  All this is autobiography, not philosophy." (from Ronald Clark, B. Russell; cf. Nietzsche above about philosophy as self-confession)

"The man who believes he is a poached egg differs from us only by being in a minority."  (1961, 646)

If pragmatism is true, then "ironclads and Maxim guns must be the ultimate arbiters of metaphysical truth." ("Pragmatism," 1909)

On induction and the assumption that the future will resemble the past: "The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken." (The Problems of Philosophy, 63)

“Wittgenstein asked affectionately after Russell’s wife and baby. 'The little boy is lovely,' Russell replied. ‘At first he looked exactly like Kant, but now he looks more like a baby.” (Monk, 210)

J-P Sartre (1905-80)
"In these various instances [of negation, anxiety] we have to do with a temporal form where I await myself in the future, where I 'make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month.'  Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to bring myself there." (Being and Nothingness, 73)

• “Fortune appears sometimes purposely to wait for the last year of our lives in order to show that she can overthrow in one moment what she has take long years to build.  Then she makes us cry out with Laberius: ‘Today I have lived too long by just one day.’” (Montaigne, Essais, I.19)

M. Scheler
“I can only describe [Kant’s attitude toward the world] as a basic ‘hostility’ toward or ‘distrust’ of the given as such, a fear of the given as ‘chaos,’ an anxiety—an attitude that can be expressed as ‘the world outside me, nature within me.’  ‘Nature’ is what is to be formed, to be organized, to be ‘controlled’; it is the ‘hostile’, the ‘chaos,’ . . . .and by the consequence of this hatred [of the world], the limitless need for activity to ‘organize’ and ‘control’ the world, which this combination of apriorism and the theory of a ‘forming’, ‘lawmaking’ understanding . . . has psychologically caused.” (Formalism in Ethics, 67) 

F. Schleiermacher (1768-1834)
“It is the properly religious view of all things to seek every trace of the divine, the true, and the eternal, even in what appears to us to be vulgar and base, and to worship even the most distant trace."

Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Hypotheses lead lives in the head like the life of an organism, which accepts from the external world only what is profitable and homogeneous with it, and evades or leaves untouched what is heterogeneous or fatal to it.  (Paraphrase by W. Dilthey (1894), GS VII, 145.)

"Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosopheri animi." (World, vol. 1, sect. 52)

W. Sellars
On foundationalism and coherentism: "One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?).  Neither will do."

• "The coherentist is offering a distinctive position concerning the structure of justification as being like a 'raft' rather than like a 'pyramid.'" (Robert Stern 2004 on E. Sosa's "The Raft and the Pyramid," in Midwest Studies of Philosophy 5 (1981): 3-25.)
  

W. Shakespeare
"Is this a dagger which I see before me / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee. / I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? / I see thee yet, in a form as palpable / As this [sword] which now I draw."--Macbeth
(An adverbial theory of perception would posit an object,if only the space where the dagger seems located, as being experienced "daggerly."--Audi, 2003, 40)

G. B. Shaw
"The true joy of life [is] the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." (Kuehn 2001, 153; compare V. Frankl)

Sophocles (496-406 BCE)
“Deception stalks those who know nothing /
Until they set their feet in fire and burn.” (Antigone, ll. 618-19)

J. Stalin (1879-1953)
"Today you play jazz, tomorrow you betray your country."

“One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

In communism, the future is well-known; it is the past that is always changing.--unknown

W. Stevens (1879-1955)
"Description is revelation." (from "Description Without Place," 121)

"After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption." (Opus Posthumus)

R.L. Stevenson
"As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen.  The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic--or maenadic--foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me." (Letters, ii, 355; cited by James as an example of the melancholic spirit that drives one toward "twice-born" religion)

M. Stirner (1806-56)
"The Germans are the first and foremost exponents of the historical vocation of radicalism; they alone are radical, and they alone justly so.  There are no others so relentless and ruthless; not only do they bring about the collapse of the existing world so that they may themselves stand fast, they also bring about the collapse of themselves.  When Germans demolish, a god must fall, a world must pass away.  To the Germans, destruction is creation, the pulverization of the temporal is eternity."

J.Swift (1667-1745)
"I then desired the Governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle.  This great philosopher freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found, that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded.  He predicted the same fate to attraction [gravity], whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters.  He said, that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; and even those who pretended to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined."

"My reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult if they would be content with those vices and follies only, which Nature hath entitled them to.  I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a lawyer, a pickpocket, a colonel, a fool, a lord, a gamester, a politician, a whoremonger, a physician, an evidence, a suborner, an attorney, a traitor, or the like: this is all according to the due course of things; but when I behold a lump of deformity and diseases both in body and mind, smitten with pride, it immediately breaks all the measures of my patience; neither shall I be every able to comprehend how such an animal and such a vice could tally together." (Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms," ch. 12)

"I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top."

P. Tillich (1886-1965)
"I recall the unforgettable moment when by chance I came into possession of the very rare first edition of the collected works of Schelling in a bookstore on my way to the University of Berlin.  I had no money, but I bought it anyway, and this spending of nonexistent money was probably more important than all the other nonexistent or sometimes existing money that I have spent." [?!]

E. Titschmarsh
"It can be of no practical use to know that π is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know." (cf. Nic Eth X.7)

Tocqueville, Democracy in America
“The philosophers of the 18th c. explained in a very simple way the gradual weakening of belief.  Religious zeal, they said, must abate in proportion as liberty and enlightenment increase.  It is annoying that the facts are not in accord with this theory. --  There is a portion of the population in Europe whose unbelief is equaled only by their brutishness and ignorance, whereas in America one sees one of the most free and enlightened peoples in the world carry out ardently all the external duties of religion.” (I.2.ix)

“In Europe, Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately linked with the earthly powers.  Today these powers are falling, and Christianity is, as it were, buried beneath their debris.  One has tried to attach a living thing to dead ones; cut the ties which hold it back, and it will get back up. -- I do not know what it would be necessary to do in order to give back to European Christianity the energy of youth.  Only God could do it; but it at least it depends on men to allow to faith the use of all the strength which it still retains.” (I.2.ix)

”Since [Americans] are accustomed to relying on the evidence of their own perceptions, they like to see very clearly the object that they are concerned with; they therefore rid it, as much as they can, of its covering; they take away everything that separates them from it and remove everything that conceals it from their view in order to see it at closer range and in the light of day.  This disposition of their mind soon leads them to have for formes [social customs], which they consider as useless and inconvenient veils placed between themselves and truth.”
(II.1.i) (Compare with Husserl on Evidenz)

T. Waits (1949-)
"The higher the monkey climbs, the more he shows his tail." ("Misery's the River of the World")

J.G. Weier (1947-)
"Unhappiness?  Becoming the person you used to hate."

"Reading someone's autobiography is like buying a roller coaster ticket: They're both taking you for a ride, by trying to defy gravity."

• The manner in writing is a sort of mask behind which the heart makes faces as it pleases. 18.10.30
• 
  
• "I don't really speak about what I see, but to it." (Brown Book, 175)

• "Die Aufgabe der Philosophie ist, das erlösende Wort zu finden, das ist das wort, das uns endlich erlaubt, das zu fassen, was bis jetzt immer, ungreifbar, unser Bewusstsein belastet hat." ("The task of philosophy is to find the redeeming word, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up until now has intangibly weighed down our consciousness."--from "Philosophy," sect. 87)

• "Was ich nicht denken darf, kann die Sprache nicht ausdrücken. Das ist unsere Beruhigung." ("What I'm not permitted to think, language cannot express. This is our comfort.")

• "Es ist oft nicht erlaubt in der Philosophie gleich Sinn zu reden, sondern man muß {oft} zuerst den Unsinn sagen weil man gerade ihn überwinden soll." ("One is often not allowed to start straight off with sense, but must often talk nonsense first since it is this which has to be overcome.")

• "Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage wie eine Krankheit." ("The philosopher handles a question as he would an illness."--PI 255)
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• "So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound."

II.  On philosophers:

• "God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone's eyes."

• "It is odd that those who ascribe reality only to things and not to our mental images move so self-confidently in the world of imagination and never long to escape from it." ("Philosophy," sect. 91)

• To Ogden, editor of the Tractatus: “Rather than print the Ergaenzungen to make the book fatter, leave a dozen white sheets for the reader to swear into when he has purchased the book and can’t understand it.” (Monk, 207)

III.  On the decadence of academic philosophy

• From Malcolm Brown: On being told that someone had given up working on his Ph.D., as he had decided he had nothing original to say, Wittgenstein allegedly said: "For that action alone, they should give him his Ph.D."

• "We find every childlike (infantile) theory again in today's philosophy, only not with the winning ways of the childlike." ("Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough")

IV.  On the peculiarities of Wittgenstein

• Sometimes I think I suffer from a sort of mental constipation.  Or is that my imagination, similar to when one fels one might vomit when, in fact, there is nothing left? 26.4.30
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• K. Popper on Wittgenstein: "Wittgenstein . . . did not show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.  Rather, I see in the fly unable to escape from the bottle a striking self-portrait of Wittgenstein.  (Wittgenstein was a Wittgensteinian case--just as Freud was a Freudian case.)" (Unended Quest; Poker, 2001)
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• From Arthur Witherall: "Not a quote but an anecdote: Wittgenstein was in America and got a lift from a professor. As they were driving, Wittgenstein asked the professor to stop the car so he could examine the leaves of a tree he had not seen before. He got out of the car, and picked up a leaf and one of the seeds of the tree. Returning to the car, he sat there for a while, looking at the odd shape of the leaf, and then the odd shape of the seed. Finally, he threw them both out of the car and exclaimed: 'Impossible!'"   Fuller version of story below:
• Stuart Brown: Ordinarily, W would refuse the offer of a ride.  But one afternoon, after it had begun to rain, I stopped to offer him a ride back to the Malcolms.  He accepted gratefully, and once in the car asked me to identify for him the seed pods of a plant which he picked. ‘Milkweek,’ I told him and pointed out the white sap for which the weed is named.  He then asked me to describe the flowers of the plant.  I failed so miserably that I at length stopped the car by a grown up field, walked out and picked him more plants, some with flowers and some with seeds.  He looked in awe from flowers to seeds pods and from seed pods to flowers.  Suddenly he crumpled them up, threw them down on the floor of the car, and trampled them.  ‘Impossible’! he said.  (Monk, 552-53)

• Fania Pascal: "If you had committed a murder, or if you were about to change your faith, Wittgenstein would be the best man to consult, but that for more ordinary anxieties and fears he could be dangerous: ‘his remedies would be all too drastic, surgical.  He would treat you for original sin.” (Monk, 459)

• "You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded."*    [*Compare B. Franklin on turning 75: "I do not know that my mental faculties are impaired; perhaps I shall be the last to discover that." (Isaacson 2003, 396)]
• 
  
• G. H. von Wright (1916-2003), On Wittgenstein: "As might be expected, his lectures were highly 'unacademic'. . . .  He had no manuscripts or notes. He thought before the class.