Nick Harkaway Quotes

Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts.

Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.

True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.

At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.

A philosophy is characterized more by the formulation of its problem than by its solution of them.

Why is it apparently the philosopher who is expected to be "easier" and not some scientist or other who is even more inaccessible to the same readers?

By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench.

The visible world was only an imperfect reflection of the Ideal, which the Philosopher sought to transcend.

All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world.

Words, like acts, become stale when they are repeated.

Human intellect is incurably abstract.

Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.

It's so interesting that we think we know the rules to this game, this total hypothetical game called, "Would you," "If you had it to do over." It's not out there.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

The habits and language of clandestinity can intoxicate even its own practitioners.

Philosophers are only men in armor after all.

By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things.

There is a kind of nonlinguistic thought going on which we are trying to represent in language, and we know that sometimes we fail.

...somehow the old philosophers could make even the most salacious topics seem boring.

Philosophers ought to aspire to know lots of different things and to forge useful synthetic perspectives.

Is Life itself a dream, I wonder?