To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.

To decide to become a philosopher seemed as foolish to me as to decide to become a poet.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.

The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.

The study of law left me unsatisfied, because I did not know the aspects of life which it serves. I perceived only the intricate mental juggling with fictions that did not interest me.

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.

Only as an individual can man become a philosopher.

Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time; it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought.

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

I began the study of medicine, impelled by a desire for knowledge of facts and of man. The resolution to do disciplined work tied me to both laboratory and clinic for a long time to come.

The more determinedly I exist, as myself, within the conditions of the time, the more clearly I shall hear the language of the past, the nearer I shall feel the glow of its life.

Everything depends therefore on encountering thought at its source. Such thought is the reality of man's being, which achieved consciousness and understanding of itself through it.

The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.

Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.

Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.

If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

I discovered that the study of past philosophers is of little use unless our own reality enters into it. Our reality alone allows the thinker's questions to become comprehensible.

Conflicts may be the sources of defeat lost life and a limitation of our potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the birth of more far reaching unities which flourish in the tensions that engender them

A scientific approach means knowing what one knows and what one doesn't. Absolute or complete knowledge is unscientific.

Bring me men to match my mountains: Bring me men to match my plains: Men with empires in their purpose and new eras in their brains.

Life for rent means that my life isn't really my own, I only rented it for a while, but if I don't manage to buy it, to own it, then nothing of what I think is mine is really mine.

When I don't have a girlfriend, who I am answerable to, I can go out and hang with people. But whether you go for a movie with someone or a meal or a drive, it is assumed that you are dating that person.

Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I do what I do, and I do it well, and focus and take it one moment at a time.

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

I sense people respond more to the honest approach to making music instead of the manufactured approach.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

Education is a continual process, it's like a bicycle... If you don't pedal you don't go forward.

I've been making music since I was 14, but for a while, I was afraid to perform.

I can live with myself.

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

A breeze blew softly slightly rippling the water as it carried the heady scents of late Carolina springtime through the air. Honeysuckle. Jasmine. Ripe pungent river mud. Ah the world felt right.

My cat is older than many fashion models. I won't even discuss the fact that she also weighs more.

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

My father always said, 'Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf' - so I make sure I read.

It's great to get out of the study and work with real living and breathing people.

We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a decadent life. And when that happens on a global scale, you're living in a decadent world.

I know that in life there will be sickness, devastation, disappointments, heartache - it's a given. What's not a given is the way you choose to get through it all. If you look hard enough, you can always find the bright side.

I believe that uncertainty is really my spirit's way of whispering, "I'm in flux. I can't decide for you. Something is off-balance here.

Whenever I was upset by something in the papers, Jack always told me to be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer.