Philosophical Phun

“Philosophy is the attempt to pick at a wet knot with boxing gloves.” -  Peter DeVries

“Philosophy is the strange but addictive attempt to define knowledge about knowledge with more knowledge about knowledge.” -  Peter DeArmond

“Knowledge without understanding is meaningless.” - Douglas Adams

“Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.” - Arthur C. Clarke

“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.” - René Descartes

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” - Margaret Thatcher

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.” - James Madison

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” - Alfred North Whitehead

“We don’t have any answer for the emptiness of existence, but we have diversions to dull the pain.” (Author unknown)

“I just found out that today is World Philosophy Day.  I’m not even ankle-deep in the wading pool of knowledge, but I do know my spirit animal is a jackass, and my pronouns are he-haw, he-haw, he-haw.” - Peter DeArmond

“The light inside you is dim, even by eastern European standards.” - Spoken by the character Alexei Shostakov in the Thunderbolts movie

“Okay Facebook Philosophers, today is the first day of the rest of your existential consternation.”  - Peter DeArmond

"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The Socratic method is what public discourse in today’s America does not resemble.” - George Will

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”

- Plato

“Anger is not an argument.” - Daniel Webster

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Face to face in a debate, his polemics will destroy you if his bad breath doesn’t get there first.” - Peter DeArmond

“To doubt everything or to believe everything … both dispense with the necessity of reflection.” - Henri Poincaré

“I heard you say that you beg to differ, and my advice to you is keep begging.” - Peter DeArmond

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.” - Archibald MacLeish

“If you feel pain, you're alive. If you feel other people's pain, you're a human being.” - Leo Tolstoy

“I need to do more research on artificial intelligence, because the real thing just isn't working for me.”  - Peter DeArmond

“There are two ways to be fooled: One is to believe what isn't true, the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”  - Soren Kierkegaard

“Stupidity is knowing the truth, seeing the truth but still believing the lies. And that is more infectious than any other disease.” - Richard Feynman

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.” - Potter Stewart

“Bumper sticker decrees are the literary evidence of bullhorn philosophers.” - Peter DeArmond

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” (Author Unknown)

“I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” - Isaac Newton

“Philosophers believe they can reason their way in and out of philosophical rabbit holes, but they seldom admit that they’re just digging deeper ones.” - Peter DeArmond

"I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me." - Herman Hesse

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” - Albert Einstein

“I am the wandering French philosopher: Peripatetic Pierre.” - Peter DeArmond

“Theological formation is the gradual and painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility.” - Henri Nouwen

“Truth without grace is not really truth, and grace without truth is not really grace.” - Timothy Keller

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” - C.S. Lewis

If people reject God, they don't believe in nothing, they end up believing in anything. - G.K. Chesterton

“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.” - Woody Allen

“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.” - James Thurber

“Tonight I can affirm that one should attempt to read Wittgenstein only with a good medicinal dose of alcohol, and for this task I recommend a 20-year-old Tawney port.” - Peter DeArmond

“There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” - Oscar Wilde

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.” - E. B. White