Wisdom

I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'

People will always disagree on metaphysical questions and it doesn't matter. Disagreement is what makes philosophy interesting.

There are indeed, few things that are likely to hamper the understanding job as much as the stiff application of a narrow logical structure.

My generation is amazed at the fact that having seen the form of the world twice over, people still look for a 'post-modern' art.

The point of studying philosophy is not to find answers but to be able to formulate the questions.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

We can only learn to love by loving.

When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed grows; when they are rewarded for love, love grows.

A cultivated mind is, I suspect, always more alive than one that hasn't been cultivated.

Philosophy is a slow revolution, for it changes the rules of thought.

The truth arrives only in the void of the question.

The question is not after the fact — how is truth possible? — but before the fact: how does the matter stand with understanding itself?

Language is the medium in which truth is disclosed.

Being that can be understood is language.

Only by looking outward can we attain new vantage points and strive for constant growth.

Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world.

Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe.

The symbol gives rise to thought; thought gives rise to symbol.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

It is right emphatically to affirm that the mind can never know the human object. Indeed, engrossed in the individual object, the human mind is almost blind to it.