philosophy

Beauty is only measured by ugly people.

The intelligent learns by succes, while the Wise learns by failure.

Khoa Nhut Nguyen.

I speculate that this is the best of all possible worlds, for philosophy is the best of humanity, and this world is the best philosophically.

He realized that he had to choose between thinking of himself as the poor victim of a thief and as an adventurer in quest of his treasure.

I'm an adventurer, looking for treasure, he said to himelf.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words "phenomenology" or "structuralism", I reach for my buck knife.

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. But men of intellect will believe anything - if it appeals to their ego, their vanity, their sense of self-importance.

Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

American democracy is a chess-game in which pawns imagine themselves to be free individuals with wills of their own: that delusion is one of the rules of the game, without which the game could not continue. I doubt anyone, no matter how sharp and sharp-tongued, could succeed in getting across to high school students how vital an acute mind is for just keeping a grip on one's life and earnings in our mendacious politics and economics. No wonder our school system is devoutly dedicated to demoralizing and blunting such minds.

To me philosophy like "intelligence" or "wisdom" is definitely a moving target, whose essence keeps metamorphosing as one gains more resources to penetrate it better. It seems only natural to me that Heraclitus would intuitively leave his murky manuscript ON PHYSIS in the temple of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, i.e. the dialectic of living animal instinct with human acuity. Philosophers are after live and very cunning prey, already I began to think of my courses at LSU in terms of safaris and big game hunts, except that more and more they dealt not with ordinary species but with monsters, dragons, still-living dinosaurs of ideologies and orthodoxies.