Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of REASON and of TASTE are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without addition and diminution: the other has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation. Reason being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown: after all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. The standard of the one, being founded on the nature of things, is eternal and inflexible, even by the will of the Supreme Being: the standard of the other arising from the eternal frame and constitution of animals, is ultimately derived from that Supreme Will, which bestowed on each being its peculiar nature, and arranged the several classes and orders of existence. – Hume’s second Enquiry, Appendix 1

Final lines of the Apology:

“When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, – then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.”

It is much more honorable and much easier not to suppress others, but to make yourselves as good as you can.
– Plato, Apology XXX

Soc: But, friend Euthyphro, if that which is holy is the same with that which is dear to God, and is loved because it is holy, then that which is dear to God would have been loved as being dear to God; but if that which dear to God is dear to him because loved by him, then that which is holy would have been holy because loved by him. But now you see that the reverse is the case, and that they are quite different from one another. For one (theophiles) is of a kind to be loved cause it is loved, and the other (osion) is loved because it is of a kind to be loved. Thus you appear to me, Euthyphro, when I ask you what is the essence of holiness, to offer an attribute only, and not the essence-the attribute of being loved by all the gods. But you still refuse to explain to me the nature of holiness. And therefore, if you please, I will ask you not to hide your treasure, but to tell me once more what holiness or piety really is, whether dear to the gods or not (for that is a matter about which we will not quarrel) and what is impiety?

I am surprised that this passage from The Gay Science has not been mentioned:

[Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed: the “specialist” emerges somewhere—his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.…Nothing can be done about that. Let nobody suppose that one could possibly avoid such crippling by some artifice of education. On this earth one pays dearly for every kind of mastery.…For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise—cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable—isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries. Well then, but in that case you also immediately get something else: instead of the craftsman and master, the “man of letters,” the dexterous, “polydexterous” man of letters who, to be sure, lacks the hunched back—not counting the posture he assumes before you, being the salesman of the spirit and the “carrier” of culture—the man of letters who really is nothing but “represents” almost everything, playing and “substituting” for the expert, and taking it upon himself in all modesty to get himself paid, honored, and celebrated in place of the expert.

No, my scholarly friends, I bless you even for your hunched back. And for despising, as I do, the “men of letters” and culture parasites. And for not knowing how to make a business of the spirit. And for having opinions that cannot be translated into financial values. And for not representing anything that you are not. And because your sole aim is to become masters of your craft, with reverence for every kind of mastery and competence, and with uncompromising opposition to everything that is semblance, half-genuine, dressed up, virtuosolike, demagogical, or histrionic in litteris et artibus—to everything that cannot prove to you its unconditional probity in discipline and prior training,]

OK, I just can’t resist posting my favorite paragraph from the “Diapsalmata”:

“My grief is my castle, which like an eagle’s nest is built high up on the mountain peaks among the clouds; nothing can storm it. From it, I fly down into reality to seize my prey; but I do not remain down there, I bring it home with me, and this prey is a picture I weave into the tapestries of my palace. There I live as one dead. I immerse everything I have experienced in a baptism of forgetfulness unto an eternal remembrance. Everything finite and accidental is forgotten and erased. Then I sit like an old man, grey-haired and thoughtful, and explain the pictures in a voice as soft as a whisper; and at my side a child sits and listens, although he remembers everything before I tell it.” – A, “Diapsalmata” in Either/Or

Unbekümmert, spöttisch, gewaltthätig – so will uns die Weisheit: sie ist ein Weib, sie liebt immer nur einen Kriegsmann. -Nietzsche

I’m with Matty that the end of Book I of Hume’s _Treatise_ is where it’s at, but I prefer a different passage, just a bit earlier:

“Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compar’d to those angels, whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings.”

Not sure if any of these are true but they move me.

‘The suggestion that a person may be in some sense liberated through acceding to a power which is not subject to his immediate voluntary control is among the most ancient and persistent themes of our moral and religious tradition. It must surely reflect some quite fundamental structural feature of our lives. This feature remains, however, relatively unexplored. As a consequence, we are unable to give satisfactorily thor- ough and perspicuous accounts of certain facts which are central to our culture and to our view of ourselves: in particular, that the two human capacities which we prize most highly are those for rationality and for love, and that these capacities are prized not only for their usefulness in enabling us to adapt to our natural and social environments but also because they are supposed to make available to us especially valuable experiences or states of fulfillment and of freedom. The idea that being rational and loving are ways of achieving freedom ought to puzzle us more than it does, given that both require a person to submit to something which is beyond his voluntary control and which may be indifferent to his desires.’
-Harry Frankfurt, ‘The Importance of What We Care About’

‘… The whole of the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful machine, moves to the discovery of just one thing, *that he did it*. Do we understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of responsibility? Certainly not: we understand it because we know that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done…This is not just a regret about what happened, such as a spectator might have. It is an agent’s regret, and it is in the nature of action that such regrets cannot be eliminated, that one’s life could not be partitioned into some things that one does intentionally and other things that merely happen to one” – Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity

“The way to solve the problem you see in life, is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mold. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mold, what is problematic will disappear” Wittgenstein

“[T]he poets and philosophers themselves know as no one else knows that what their formulas express leaves unexpressed almost everything that they organically divine and feel. So I feel that there is a center in truth’s forest where I have never been: to track it out and get there is the secret spring of all my poor life’s philosophic efforts; at moments I almost strike into the final valley, there is a gleam of the end, a sense of certainty, but always there comes still another ridge, so my blazes merely circle toward the true direction; and although now, if ever, would be the fit occasion, yet I cannot take you to the wondrous hidden spot to-day. To-morrow it must be, or to-morrow, or to-morrow, and pretty surely death will overtake me ere the promise is fulfilled.” ~William James, ‘Philosophical conceptions and practical results’

The opening paragraph to Kierkegaard’s “Repetition”:

“WHEN the Eleatics denied motion, Diogenes, as everyone knows, came forward in protest, actually came forward, because he did not say a word, but simply walked back and forth a few times, with which gesture he believed he had sufficiently refuted the Eleatic position. When I had been preoccupied for some time, at least when I had the opportunity, with the problem of whether repetition was possible and what it means, whether a thing wins or loses by being repeated, it suddenly occurred to me: you can go to Berlin, since you were there once before, you could in this way learn whether repetition was possible and what it meant. I had come to a standstill in my attempts to resolve this problem at home. Say what you will, this problem is going to play an important role in modern philosophy because repetition is a decisive expression for what ‘recollection’ was for the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowledge is recollection, thus will modern philosophy teach that life itself is a repetition. The only modern philosopher who has had the least intimation of this is Leibniz. Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards. Repetition, if it is possible, thus makes a person happy, while recollection makes him unhappy, assuming, of course, that he actually gives himself time to live and does not, immediately upon the hour of his birth hit upon an excuse, such as that he has forgotten something, to sneak back out of life again.”

“We are born only once, and we cannot be born twice; and one must for all eternity exist no more. You are not in control of tomorrow and yet you delay your opportunity to rejoice”
-Epicurus, Vatican Saying 14

Bruce here teaches classical philosophy, Bruce there teaches Hegelian philosophy, and Bruce here teaches logical positivism. And is also in charge of the sheep dip.

And what’s a little Quine without a little Davidson? “In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth–quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the
dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“What is youth? A dream. What is love? The dream’s content.” – Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I’ve always loved this bit of Schopenhauer:

“As a comfort to those who devote their life and strength in any way at all to the noble but onerous struggle against error, I cannot refrain here from adding that as long as truth is absent, error can indeed play its games in the night just as owls or bats do; nevertheless, it is more likely that these owls and bats will chase the sun back into the east than that a truth, once recognised and clearly and completely expressed, could be driven back so that some past error could once again occupy its broad seat without disturbance. That is the power of truth: its victory is difficult and troublesome, but once it is achieved, it can never be reversed.” (From The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1.)

This makes me cry when I read it: “To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings — the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward — I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, to a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feeling which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.” JSMill dedication to “On Liberty”

“What is it to love another person, and is it ever a good idea? The ones who have told us the most or the most insightful things about love are poets and novelists. Philosophers, although they are supposed to be lovers of some sort, tend to be all thumbs when it comes to handling love, but since I am only a philosopher I will look at some of their attempts.” (Annette Baier, Unsafe Loves, first sentence)

Maybe not the most beautiful, but

‘A will which resolves on nothing is not an actual will; the characterless man can never resolve on anything. The reason for such indecision may also lie in an over-refined sensibility which knows that, in determining something, it enters the realm of finitude, imposing a limit on itself and relinquishing infinity; yet it does not wish to renounce the totality to which it intends. Such a disposition is dead, even if its aspiration is to be beautiful. “Whoever aspires to great things,” says Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Only by making resolutions can the human being enter actuality, however painful the process may be; for inertia would rather not emerge from that inward brooding in which it reserves a universal possibility for itself. But possibility is not yet actuality. The will which is sure of itself does not therefore lose itself in what it determines.’
–Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right

Some of these choices make me (in all seriousness) wonder what many philosophers think “beauty” means. Something like “witty,” maybe? Just “smart”?

Somehow I’m reminded of an old Kids in the Hall sketch about a business executive who goes on a mystical retreat. The shaman orders him, “Show me your soul. Dig deep and show me the pain of your past.” He responds, “Oh, you
mean like a juicy anecdote? Okay, here goes. I don’t recall much of my past, but I do remember my neighbors. They were Spaniards. They grew fine tomatoes!”

What a cliche!

Having already treated of the celestial world, as far as our conjectures could reach, we proceed to treat of animals, without omitting, to the best of our ability, any member of the kingdom, however ignoble. For if some have no graces to charm the sense, yet even these, by disclosing to intellectual perception the artistic spirit that designed them, give immense pleasure to all who can trace links of causation, and are inclined to philosophy. Indeed, it would be strange if mimic representations of them were attractive, because they disclose the mimetic skill of the painter or sculptor, and the original realities themselves were not more interesting, to all at any rate who have eyes to discern the reasons that determined their formation. We therefore must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful. Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in Nature’s works in the highest degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the beautiful.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals I, 5 (trans. William Ogle)

Parfit on his views about personal identity in Reasons and Persons:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air.”

Reasons and Persons, p. 281.

“Consider the following case:
On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley.” Michael Patton, “Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things?”
This, and the rest of the short article, is beautiful. It is a beautiful indictment of the whole ridiculous industry of trolleyology. You would have thought that that beautiful article would have put an end to the whole industry, which would then have drowned in a sea of derisive laughter. But the article was published (In the APA Proceedings and Addresses) in 1988, well before the worst excesses of trolleyology were to occur. Michael Patton is, therefore, the John the Baptist of modern moral philosophy–a voice crying in the wilderness (which is the most complimentary description of Alabama that I can think of).

From the beginning of Cohen’s “Karl Marx’s Theory of History,”

Here, then, is a man, moving about the world. As he acts, observes, and suffers, the world reveals itself to him, and he reveals himself to it, imposing his demands on it and pursuing his purposes through it. He spiritualizes nature and impresses a nature on his spirit. He discovers what stones and flowers and water are like, and how to look up at the stars and down canyons. He learns to change the shapes of nature, to mix and separate its elements. He learns how to live, how to make live, how to let let, and how to kill. He gains understanding of the world’s glories, charms, deformities, and dangers. He intervenes in it to secure survival, power, and pleasure.

But he also experiences a substance of a different order. He is in contact and in dialogue with himself. There is a contrast between his confrontation with the world outside and his encounter with the part of the world he is. In the first exercise he is distinct from what he examines; in the second he is not, and his study must be a part of what he studies. He may learn about his surroundings without changing them, but his self-exploration is always also a transformation. It leaves him no longer as he was, investing him with a new self, one more self-aware. And if he would keep hold of his nature he must inspect it afresh: a new nature has supervened on the one he penetrated, because that one was penetrated. His project of self-consciousness is a continual effort which yields continual achievement, a race whose tape is advanced when the finish is reached. It is possessed by being constantly acquired and only acquired by being constantly developed.

Nor is what a man knows about himself unaffected by what he believes about himself, by the conjectures attending his endeavour to see. If he thinks himself confident he is half way to being so. If he thinks himself contemptible, he elicits contempt. Supposing himself fragile, he is shaken by minor adversity. He makes himself, guided by an image of what he is, and what he believes he is thus contributes to what he is in fact.

I’m surprised that nobody else has yet offered this:

“Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.”

(The closing lines of A Theory of Justice.)

You find the same idea expressed, with similar formulations, in Leviathan, ch. 13, 2nd or so para – and before that in Montaigne’s Essais, II.17, On Presumption.

Matt (of course!), lighten up yourself, sunshine!

Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre, Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.

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

“It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. . . But of course a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one.”

“Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.”

Whitehead, the first Process and Reality and the others Adventures in Ideas.

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted of object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” ~Chuckie Darwin

“One can [say] that the atomic system behaves “in a certain relation, ‘As If …” and “in a certain relation, ‘ As If …,” but that is, so to speak, only a legalistic contivance which cannot be turned into clear thinking ”

(letter from E. Schrödinger to N. Bohr, October 23, 1926)

“That would not be an argument, but a magic spell.” – David Lewis on refuting the skeptic.

From the first of Seneca’s Moral letters to Lucilius:

1. Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius – set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words, – that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose.

2. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.
Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.

3. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

‘Ouch’ is a one-word sentence which a man may volunteer from time to time by way of laconic comment on the passing show. (Quine, Word and Object)

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” – JS Mill

If we are, as most of us seem to be, inclined to accept the objectivity of the shameful and the concepts that fall under it, and if we are also inclined to embrace a neo-Humean conception of practical rationality and the good life, then it will be hard for us to retain a certain form of self-respect as it applies to our reasons and lives. I think many of us will want to have it both ways. But perhaps we cannot. – Warren Quinn, Rationality and the Human Good 1992

“The world around us opens before our view so magnificent a spectacle of order, variety, beauty, and conformity to ends, that whether we pursue our observations into the infinity of space in the one direction, or into its illimitable divisions in the other, whether we regard the world in its greatest or its least manifestations — even after we have attained to the highest summit of knowledge which our weak minds can reach, we find that language in the presence of wonders so inconceivable has lost its force, and number its power to reckon, nay, even thought fails to conceive adequately, and our conception of the whole dissolves into an astonishment without the power of expression — all the more eloquent that it is dumb. 

Everywhere around us we observe a chain of causes and effects, of means and ends, of death and birth; and, as nothing has entered of itself into the condition in which we find it, we are constantly referred to some other thing, which itself suggests the same inquiry regarding its cause, and thus the universe must sink into the abyss of nothingness, unless we admit that, besides this infinite chain of contingencies, there exists something that is primal and self-subsistent — something which, as the cause of this phenomenal world, secures its continuance and preservation.”

Immanuel Kant — Critique Of Pure Reason.  

“Why care about objective value or ethical reality? The sanction is that if you do not, your inner states will fail to deserve folk theoretical names. Not a threat that will strike terror into the hearts of the wicked! But whoever thought that philosophy could replace the hangman?”

–      David Lewis, “Desire As Belief II”

The emptiness of the uncertainty of tomorrow becomes the possibility of thinking or imagining another World.
Virtues From Hell, By Fidèle Ingiyimbere

– the question is the answer –

Some other people have already quoted a lot of the prettier lines from Kant, so I’ll go with two that, while not beautiful, are quite good:

Someone who makes a worm of himself can’t complain when he’s stepped on.

When someone who likes to vex and annoy peace loving people finally gets a good beating for his efforts, even he in his reason must admit justice was done to him.

“Tedium is the vehicle of an abstract authority, and the reader waits in the corridors of Habermas’s prose like a petitioner to whom the truth has been promised, albeit only abstractly, on a document that is perhaps already out of date.” (Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left)

C.D. Broad, a great and often very funny writer, on love (from his Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy):

If we may compare prolonged and successful sexual love for a person to the course of a river from its source to the sea, it begins as a violent torrent in a narrow bed of rocks and shallows; in its middle reaches it receives many tributaries; and in its later stages it becomes a calm wide deep stream … Too often, of course, there is no such happy ending, and the stream peters out into the shallows of mere habitual toleration or the swamps of mutual irritation and frustration.

I am not capable of identifying a possible candidate for philosophy’s “most beautiful sentence or paragraph” but can share instead one of my favorite paragraphs:

“[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat.’ If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions ‘cat,’ ‘on,’ and ‘mat’—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category ‘cat’ because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species a given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category ‘mat’ because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category ‘on’ because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, ‘the cat is on the mat,’ and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, ‘the cat is on the mat’ would be as irrational as ‘the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76’ would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (‘considerate,’ ‘selfish’). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.” — Hilary Putnam
 
 

“La philosophie est une réflexion pour qui toute matière étrangère est bonne, et nous dirions volontiers pour qui toute bonne matière doit être étrangère.” – Canguilhem

(the image automatically appeared after posting and is not of me)

Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum.

Nothing can be said so absurd that it has not been said by some of the philosophers.

— Cicero

以水济水岂是学问

To simply add water to water cannot be called learning.

— Huang Zongxi, The Record of Ming Scholars (17th c.)

(In urging philosophers to be original in their thinking)