Philosopher Quotes

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

Who ever said that one was born just once?

Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.

I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

I think many people are terribly afraid of being demoted by the Darwinian scheme from the role of authors and creators in their own right into being just places where things happen in the universe.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!

Now as of old the gods give men all good things, excepting only those that are baneful and injurious and useless. These, now as of old, are not gifts of the gods: men stumble into them themselves because of their own blindness and folly.

I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.

Men should strive to think much and know little.

It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new.

If thou suffer injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it.

Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.

It is better to destroy one's own errors than those of others.

Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.