philosophy Quotes

Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

The faith that stands on authority is not faith.

Intuition and concepts constitute... the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

It's really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.

Karl Marx was in favor of socialist and communist-socialist revolutions, but he had a pretty nuanced view about it.