"Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits."

"Language steps in where the angels of experience fear to tread."

"To recognize a difficulty is not to solve it."

"According to Confucianism, the ideal life contains a large dose of respect for traditional ways. All these ideals can be fleshed out and painted in more or less attractive colours. Yet there is something uncomfortable about them, if only because there is little reason to suppose that there is any such thing as the ideal life. Since different people have different tastes and interests, and different cultures encourage different concerns, it seems unlikely that any 'ideal life' will be heavily contextualized: ideal for this person in these circumstances, perhaps, but not much more."

"We think about what to do, and muster considerations and arguments in favor of one course or another. How are we to think about that?"

"Motion however will not help unless we have things moving."

"Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?"

"Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying "Hate if you Love Jesus", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right."

"What underlies our assignment of probabilities in the real world?"

"But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes."

"It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart."

"A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority."

"Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything."

"Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation."

"If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling."

"There was content, but no container."

"But it is logically impossible that there could exist an 'unowned' dent, a dent without a surface that is dented."

"In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual."

"Finding a mechanism does not bypass the problem of induction."

"Chance is as relentless as necessity."

"Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility."

"We can grieve over lost powers and memories, or rejoice over gained knowledge and maturity, according to taste."

"We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience ... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world ... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system."

"Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there."

"An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march."

"Perhaps to restore human freedom we should deny determinism?"

"A signpost doesn't in and of itself represent the way to the village. We have to learn how to take it."

"The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird."

"Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous."

"In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other."

"The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to be made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge."

"Paradigms can be asked to show their worth, an some of them do not stand up."

"A system is said to be coherent if every fact in the system is related every other fact in the system by relations that are not merely conjunctive. A deductive system affords a good example of a coherent system."

"Perceiving involves more than being sensibly aware of something present to the senses; it involves the activity of perceiving. This is the activity of a person, and in perceiving, the whole person is involved, not merely one or other of his sense organs."

"A mind in blinkers is a mind that is unfree."

"I am convinced of the urgent need for democratic people to think clearly without the distortions due to unconscious bias and unrecognised ignorance. Our failures in thinking in part due to our faults which we could to some extent overcome were we to see clearly how these faults arise."

"...we easily fall into the habit of accepting compressed statements which save us from the trouble of thinking. Thus arises what I shall call ‘Potted Thinking’."

"...potted thinking is easily accepted, is concentrated in form, and has lost the vitamins essential to mental nourishment."

"We must face the unfortunate fact that we are moved to the acceptance of beliefs by factors that are wholly irrelevant to their truth."

"There are many ways of being wrong, but only one way of being right."

"We are content to accept without testing any belief that fits in with our prejudices and whose truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our desires."

"Good or bad I propose to be something great!"

"Two things greater Than all things are; And the first is love And the second is war."

"What does it matter whether millions of semi-brainless beings curse or bless my memory? It is equally one to me whether they hang my bones in chains like they did the bones of Cromwell, or build a pyramid of stone over my mouldering coffin. Today only do I regard. Today I know. Today is mine. Today I wish to be something."

"Why should we not go to the extremes if we desire to play a part in the great world drama?...to go to the extremes is ever symptomatic of genius and greatness. Weakness is to compromise, to hesitate, to be halfhearted."

"Why do men go to war? Is it not in some way to better their condition. All these new fangled notions that men fight for other things than their own personal advantage is pure delusion. It is the solid things of life that men are ever after, though some of them haven't the courage to admit it. What is love of country but love of it's good things?"

"Now what I desire to know is this: If we want to shoot a man and he badly wants to shoot us, why should we not take his property (if we can) as well as his life? Isn't that the way men win a 'fatherland' first? Don't they fight and conquer the original owners and then take the land? Very well then, what is the good of being a soldier, of risking your life, and being a brave man in battle, if you cannot sieze from your beaten enemy, what your greater valor wins and what you stand badly in need of?"

"Women find little pleasure in the society of women."

"Most women you know are very much interested in the man who is reputed to be deeply admired by other women."

"Those three divine attributes of a perfect woman: goodness, beauty and wealth."