“No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion.”
More from Virginia Woolf on Philosophy
“Thoughts are divine.”
“Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”
“Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”
“I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter”
“I reach my object and say, Wander no more. All else is trial and make-believe.”
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”
“One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold.”
“It is no use trying to sum people up.”
“No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”