Favourite Philosophy Quotes

Redundancy is my favourite business strategy.

Some years ago I adjourned with a friend to a nearby schoolyard net for a recreational hit. On the way, we exchanged philosophies of cricket, and a few personal partialities. What, my friend asked, did I consider my favourite shot? 'Easy,' I replied ingenuously. 'Back-foot defensive stroke.' My friend did a double take and demanded a serious response. When I informed him he'd had one, he scoffed: 'You'll be telling me that Chris Tavaré's your favourite player next.' My guilty hesitation gave me away. 'You Poms!' he protested. 'You all stick together!

Take care, ye philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom! Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience; it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as protectors of truth upon earth—as though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors! and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye know sufficiently well that it cannot be of any consequence if YE just carry your point; ye know that hitherto no philosopher has carried his point, and that there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little interrogative mark which you place after your special words and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all the solemn pantomime and trumping games before accusers and law-courts! Rather go out of the way! Flee into concealment! And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared! And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with golden trellis-work! And have people around you who are as a garden—or as music on the waters at eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. Choose the GOOD solitude, the free, wanton, lightsome solitude, which also gives you the right still to remain good in any sense whatsoever! How poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war make one, which cannot be waged openly by means of force! How PERSONAL does a long fear make one, a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies! These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly-persecuted ones—also the compulsory recluses, the Spinozas or Giordano Brunos—always become in the end, even under the most intellectual masquerade, and perhaps without being themselves aware of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-Brewers (just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics and theology!), not to speak of the stupidity of moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher, his "sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in him; and if one has hitherto contemplated him only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous desire to see him also in his deterioration (deteriorated into a "martyr," into a stage-and-tribune-bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a desire to be clear WHAT spectacle one will see in any case—merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real tragedy IS AT AN END, supposing that every philosophy has been a long tragedy in its origin.

Looking up at the worlds beyond our own will always be my favourite hobby.

If you want to be interesting for your own God, you must have something that your God does not know about.

My favourite book is the Holy Bible.

Better an Army of Lovers than an Army of NATO and Putin! Sex is my favourite exercise! Love is my favourite philosophy! Rosen Markov 2024

One of his [Freud] favourite doctrines was that of 'rationalization', which may be put as follows. We pride ourselves on being reasonable in our beliefs and actions; when we accept a belief, we like to think that we have adopted it on good grounds; when we decide on an action, we like to think that we have done so because it is right; and if challenged, we readily produce reasons. But these reasons turn out, when examined, to be 'rationalizations' merely, that is, attempts to dress up in rational guise beliefs or actions that sprang, not from reasons at all, but from non-rational causes. [...] What fastened the attention of Freud was that man continually goes wrong. His religious beliefs record an attempt, 'patently infantile', to find a father-substitute; his philosophical systems are projections upon nature of his half hidden desires; his scientific and artistic pursuits mark the sublimation of frustrated instincts; his political convictions are apologies for, or protests against his position in society; even his ethics is an uneasy compromise between selfish desire and group pressures. 'I am sure only of one thing,' Freud wrote, 'that the judgments of value made by mankind are immediately determined by their desire for happiness; in other words, that those judgments are attempts to prop up their illusions with arguments.

The System would tolerate these harmless activities as a means to allow people to go through the Power Process to meet contrived needs which pose no threat to its dominance. For example, rather than directly work towards obtaining food and shelter, one would occupy one’s time with innocuous pastimes like building model ships or cheering for a particular football team, despite the fact that one’s quality of life would not be improved at all even by seeing one’s favourite team win the top championship game. Kaczynski of course calls these surrogate activities.

One day I’ll meet my reputation in person. And I’ll ask it if it would like to have an ice-cream with me up my favourite tree… and of course, it will tell me to get fucked.

Poetry is like shards of meteorites falling on barren land – the shining of the secret stone unseen; the song of the vibration unheard; the fire in the ancient stone, forever burning alone. The old mother of all is sitting under her favourite ash tree. She touches the shedding bark with her knobbly fingers and traces the wounds of unresolved shadows in strange circular patterns. She sees her children cry, their tears strange silver knobs that read like braille.

However, it’s in a less formal book by Bentham, The Commonplace Book, that you find the phrase ‘the happiness of the greatest number’, which really sums up the philosophy. (‘commonplace books’ being a kind of posh scrapbook popular at the time with intellectuals to copy out their favourite poems and so on.)

The Roman philosopher Boethius attained the important position of magister officiorum under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. This involved being head of the civil service and chief of the palace officials, a position which can have left little time for his favourite pursuit, die study of philosophy. But Theodoric’s trust in Boethius did not persist. The philosopher was accused of treason, arrested, condemned, and sent into exile to await execution. While imprisoned in Pavia, Boethius composed The Consolation of Philosophy, the work by which he is now chiefly remembered. He was tortured and then bludgeoned to death in 524 or 525 AD.

I have had an affinity for books throughout my life. Ever since I was little, I used to read children’s books and I loved going to book shops and buying books. My father would give me ten rupees to go to the Raina Book Depot in Srinagar, which was a great delight. When I went to Doon [a boarding school in Dehradun] I started reading more extensively. I remember reading many of the P.G. Wodehouse novels, the Sherlock Holmes and Scarlet Pimpernel series, and I loved the classics: War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, The Three Musketeers. I subsequently moved to more serious reading: books on philosophy and politics by Plato, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Vivekananda, the Arthurian novels by Mary Stewart and the Cretan novels of Mary Renault are some of my favourites. In poetry, I love Yeats, Wordsworth, Sri Aurobindo, Gurudev Tagore, Robert Frost in English; Ghalib, Faiz and Iqbal in Urdu, Dinkar and Tulsidas in Hindi.