I was reading Plato's 'The Republic' at age 18, and I can't account fully the electricity that had for me.
The first book I ever really read was Plato's 'Republic,' and then I had to go over that five times or something.
Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.
I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.
Wisdom finds its literary expression in wisdom literature.
The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.
Written by the ancient Chinese philosopher of the same name, the 'Zhuangzi' is one long perplexing puzzle of a rambling collection of enigmatic short stories. It's a strange feeling to laugh at a joke written by someone in the 4th century B.C.
If you read philosophical texts of the tradition, you'll notice they almost never said 'I,' and didn't speak in the first person. From Aristotle to Heidegger, they try to consider their own lives as something marginal or accidental. What was essential was their teaching and their thinking. Biography is something empirical and outside, and is considered an accident that isn't necessarily or essentially linked to the philosophical activity or system.
I tried to make sense of the Four Books, until love arrived, and it all became a single syllable.
I'm a total nerd, so I'm on my telescope, or I read a lot. I'm very inspired by ancient history.
I read "The Yoga Sutras" every day.And also the "The Bhagavad Gita." Those two books sit by my bed.
Summertime, and the reading is easy... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.
There are certain books in the world which every searcher for truth must know: the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Origin of Species, and Karl Marx's Capital.
I read Plato's 'Republic.' I read it through about five times until I could actually understand it.
I want to read philosophers.
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
