"There are no free lunches in philosophy any more than in real life."

"Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."

"Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all."

"...as I get older, I find myself insisting on my right to be philosophically sloppy."

"And so these refined parents rejected their five-year-old girl to all kinds of torture. They beat her, kicked her, flogged her, for no reason that they themselves knew of. The child’s whole body was covered in bruises. Eventually they devised a new refinement. Under the pretext that the child dirtied her bed (as though a five-year-old deep in her angelic sleep could be punished for that), they forced her to eat excrement, smearing it all over her face. And it was the mother that did it! And that woman would lock her daughter up in the outhouse until morning and she did so even on the coldest nights, when it was freezing. Just imagine the woman being able to sleep with the child’s cries coming from that outhouse! Imagine that little creature, unable to even understand what is happening to her, beating her sore little chest with her tiny fist, weeping hot, unresentful, meek tears, and begging ‘gentle Jesus’ to help her… ...let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that, only to attain this, you would have to torture just one single creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could build that edifice, would you agree to do it?"

"Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings."

"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing."

"Ignore a person kill the person."

"One must reach out and try to grasp this astonishing finesse, that the value of lif cannot be estimated."

"It's not enough merely to exist. Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to relize his own true worth."

"The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason."

"We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities."

"Almost all arguments for skepticism make reference to seemingly ridiculous possibilities—we are being deceived by an evil demon, life is just a dream, we are brains in vats. You might propose psychoanalysis, rather than philosophical reflection, for anyone who worries about these possibilities."

"How could someone possibly be that beautiful? She wondered for the hundred thousandth time. What higher power orchestrated such a perfect union of genes? Who decided that one single solitary soul deserved skin like that? It was so fundamentally unfair.(Chasing Harry Winston)"

"The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true state. The sciences have two extremes which meet. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great intellects, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same ignorance from which they set out; but this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself. Those between the two, who have departed from natural ignorance and not been able to reach the other, have some smattering of this vain knowledge and pretend to be wise. These trouble the world and are bad judges of everything. The people and the wise constitute the world; these despise it, and are despised. They judge badly of everything, and the world judges rightly of them."

"the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess sucess is our national disease"

"Every man knows that he will die: and nobody believes it. On that paradox stand not only a host of religions but the entity of a sane being."

"Astonishment is the root of philosophy."

"What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet."

"The perfect is the enemy of the good."

"Philosophy cannot and should not give us an account of faith, but should understand itself and know just what it has indeed to offer, without taking anything away, least of all cheating people out of something by making them think it is nothing."

"...convinced that in trying to please all, he had pleased none, and had lost his ass into the bargain."