Harry Frankfurt Quotes

As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.

Harry Frankfurt

• Philosopher
• Wilderness

• Previous
• Next

Quotes to Explore

• Give me a mystery – just a plain and simple one – a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery – just one!

  

  Yevgeny Yevtushenko
  • Silence
  • Mystery
  • Diffidence

• This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

  

  Zygmunt Bauman
  • You
  • Class
  • Lower Class

• Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.

  

  Oswald Chambers
  • God
  • Never Been

• There is also something called the Legislature. There is something called the press. There is something called people. These are all different players on the stage.

  

  Andrew Cuomo
  • People
  • Different
  • Player

• From the earliest time the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

  

  W. Somerset Maugham
  • Time
  • Generations
  • Nonsense

• Getting older is tough. I remember the last time I felt an erection. It was at the movies. The only trouble is, it belonged to the guy sitting next to me.

  

  Jack Roy
  • Time
  • Remember
  • Guy

• First the amendment of their own minds. For the removal of the impediments of the mind will sooner clear the passages of fortune than the obtaining fortune will remove the impediments of the mind.

  

  Francis Bacon
  • Passages
  • Impediments
  • Own Minds

• I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Mountains
  • Carried
  • Sufferer

• More matter with less art.

  

  William Shakespeare
  • Art
  • Matter
  • Polonius

• By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

  

  William Trevor
  • People
  • Character
  • Ends

• Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

  

  Sigmund Freud
  • Couches
  • Psychiatry
  • Teaching People

• My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.

  

  Charlotte Bronte
  • Dead
  • Hopes
  • Doom

• There's too many interesting women I have…not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.

  

  Dustin Hoffman
  • Life
  • Women
  • Experience

• The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I'm working on. And I think that's going to make me last longer than me.

  

  Anthony Quinn

• The writer learns to write, in the last resort, only by writing. He must get words onto paper even if he is dissatisfied with them.

  

  Paul Johnson
  • Words
  • Writer
  • Paper

• The late British-born philosopher Alan Watts, in one of his wonderful lectures on eastern philosophy, used this analogy: "If I draw a circle, most people, when asked what I have drawn, will say I have drawn a circle or a disc, or a ball. Very few people will say I've drawn a hole in the wall, because most people think of the inside first, rather than thinking of the outside. But actually these two sides go together--you cannot have what is 'in here' unless you have what is out there.' " In other words, where we are is vital to who we are.

  

  Eric Weiner
  • Thinking
  • Philosopher
  • Circle

• Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was - 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within - internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing.

  

  Angela Davis
  • Today
  • Black
  • Reading

• As a philosopher, I'm not obliged to explore every unknown wilderness.

  

  Harry Frankfurt
  • Philosopher
  • Wilderness