Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?
No thought is born in me that does not bear the image of death.
I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong
My misfortune is my ability to see both sides even of the fundamental religious question.
I am a man for whom the outside world exists.
Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
I try to keep this in mind when tied in to a rope 75 feet up in a tree... The history of ideas about our place in the universe has been a long series of let-downs for those who like to believe we are special.
I'm in a period of growth and expansion. I'm taking long, hard looks at the world and what's happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I'm trying to become acquainted with the universe - with the part of it I occupy - and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is.
Only with the ultimate knowledge of all things will man have come to know himself. For things are but the boundaries of man.
Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.
Dear me! I must be turning into a god.
I'm this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive.
If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.
I might be a touch of a sadist and a little bit jejune... but at least I'm not a victim, not any longer. I hope. I hope, therefore I am.
For so it is, O Lord my God, I measure it! But what it is I measure, I do not know.
The biggest questions that always have perplexed me are "Where do I come from?" and "Where am I going?"
we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.
I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.
Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I'm the only person who can't understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they're not that great. These are questions everyone has.
Did I play my part well in this comedy of life?
Philosophers.-We are full of things which take us out of ourselves.
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.
The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.
I am not 'in pursuit of truth.' It is not my 'quarry.' I am of my human nature a thinker, and conscious of need, responsibility of thinking-speaking with truth. I do not go about hunting 'truths.'
