Philosophy Quotes

"I am an idealist. I believe in the power of ideas."

"I am against all ideologies. I am for the open society."

"I am a rationalist, but not a naïve rationalist."

"The poverty of historicism, as I call it, is the belief that we can predict the future."

"The worst thing that can happen to us is to think that we have reached the final truth."

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

"Every question is a path to the truth."

"Existence precedes essence."

"Everything is absurd, but people act as if it has meaning."

"I feel nauseated when I see in front of me the pure, meaningless, senseless contingency of existence."

"Despair is the natural condition of the lucid man."

"Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question insofar as this being implies a being other than itself."

"Man looks at the world and finds it irrational; yet he insists on acting rationally."

"The past is frozen and cannot be changed; the future is not yet; only the present is active."

"To be is to do."

"The meaning of an action is not determined by its consequences alone."

"Ambiguity is the fundamental character of human existence."

"The project is the fundamental structure of human consciousness."

"The object of hatred is never the enemy but the world he represents."

"The self is not a substance but a structure of consciousness."

"The essence of hate is repulsion and not conquest."

"Shame is the revelation of myself as an object for others."

"Nothingness is the source of all negation."

"The individual and society are not in opposition but in dialogue."

"The virtues were not invented any more than euclidean geometry was invented; they were discovered as permanent features of human life."

"We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity."

"Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments are nothing but expressions of preference."

"Liberalism lacks any adequate account of tradition and the social bases of human flourishing."

"The virtues are as essential to us as our form."

"Teleology was expelled from nature; it should not have been expelled from human nature."