Philosophical Writing Quotes

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

Russell's prose has been compared by T.S. Eliot to that of David Hume's. I would rank it higher, for it had more color, juice, and humor. But to be lucid, exciting and profound in the main body of one's work is a combination of virtues given to few philosophers. Bertrand Russell has achieved immortality by his philosophical writings.

Do you know why Albert Camus was so prolific? He wrote to keep from screaming.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

Sometimes I am glad I am not a philosopher - how would I ever complete a single chain of thought when someone is constantly asking me to do something? I don't think Plato would have been able to write his dialogues if he had a wife who kept bugging him to pass the pita bread.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

'Matisse and Picasso' is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn't write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn't write about them.

I would have been an essayist in the 18th century. Maybe I'd have had one gag in the piece, but essentially I'd be saying something.

I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.

Until the early 90s, when I was working on a project about the idea of free will in American philosophy. I knew that Lincoln had had something to say about "necessity" and "fatalism," and so I began writing him into the book. In fact, Lincoln took over. I wrote instead 'Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President,' in 1999, and I've splitting rails with Mr. Lincoln ever since. If there's a twelve-step process for this somewhere, I haven't found it yet.

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover some subject to which I could impart a philosophical significance of infinite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank, I would feel either that I was wholly devoid of talent or perhaps that some malady of the brain was hindering its development.

I want to read philosophers.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

I sort of mind living in a time when most of the literature is terribly personal. I suppose it's because I grew up on a love of history, philosophy, science and religion, but not to think too much about yourself.

Plutarch's peers were writing "rhetorics," which were these dry philosophical treatises that made really broad gestures about life and death and fate. Plutarch stepped out of the stream to create an essayistic form that relied on a digressive structure and down to earth anecdotes.