Philosopher Quotes

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

A revolution only lasts fifteen years, a period which coincides with the effectiveness of a generation.

Rancor is an outpouring of a feeling of inferiority.

Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.

We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

An 'unemployed' existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.

Love is that splendid triggering of human vitality the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward someone else.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.

The more language is a living operation, the less we are aware of it. Thus it follows from the self-forgetfulness of language that its real being consists in what is said in it.

It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.

It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

In fact history does not belong to us; but we belong to it.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

Nothing exists except through language.

Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live.

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.

We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science - revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence.

The way we make sense of a realistic text is through the same broad ideological frame as the way we make sense of our social experience or rather, the way we are made sense of by the discourses of our culture.

The persecuting spirit has its origin... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?

One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere.

You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not.

Who can wonder at the attractiveness... of the bar, for our ambitious young men, when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?

Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.