Philosophy is "an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.
The western mind makes definitions; it draws lines.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...
I was always attracted to taking a novel position, but one grounded in the materials I'd been given, not made up out of whole cloth.
Interpretive thinking, as an art form, is dying.
I think that plain old intellectualism [can be] a more powerful force than the idea of the femme fatale.
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
I do think in numbers. My mind works that way.
Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.
I like intellectual journeys.
It's just human nature to try and figure things out. So, when we're in the midst of a situation, we usually try to reason our way through it.
How have people come to be taken in by The Phenomenon of Man? We must not underestimate the size of the market for works of this kind [pseudoscience/'woo'], for philosophy-fiction. Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.
Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.
Intelligence is not discernment and judgment or critical evaluation.
