Pantagruelism is a certain gaitey of the spirit consisting in a disdain for the hazards of fortune.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.
Only the philosophical question is perennial, not the answers.
As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.
We are spirits clad in veils.
If God were to exist for the entire humanity, he would be profoundly vile, as he allows the existence of unfathomable sin, stupidity, madness, and misery for no reason than his own despicable enjoyment. God exists though, not for all humanity, but for a one chosen man - a philosopher - who is bound to answer the greatest philosophical question, the question about the nature of the questioner's existence, which progressively quenches the divine vanity.
A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.
Philosophy, having crept clinging to the rocks so far, puts out its feelers many ways in vain.
When Apollo 13 appeared as an opportunity and I began to tackle that in as authentic a way as I possibly could, I really became enthralled by the philosophical side of space travel, and why we need to explore - what it means to us here on Earth - all of those things. I became a huge proponent.
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
One of the characteristics of the university is that it is made up of professors who train professors, or professionals training professionals. Education was this no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to become fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in other that they might learn how to train other specialists. This is the danger of "Scholasticism," that philosophical tendency which began to be sketched at the end of antiquity, developed in the Middle Ages, and whose presence is still recognizable in philosophy today.
Existence precedes and rules essence.
The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.
What a peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call 'thought'.
The learning and knowledge that we have,is,at the most,but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.
The good is the beautiful.
Sometimes my poetry is an attempt to keep off existential terror; sometimes it is a grappling with philosophical problems; sometimes just fun.
A person's fears are lighter when the danger is at hand.
Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It's wrong.