39 quotes
The best is nothing more than reality as it is. This was Hegel's pessimism.
La conoscenza del peggio (1982)
An idea does not seem truly reliable to me unless it also satisfies my senses.
Dialogo teologico (1993)
If Karl Kraus had written ‘'Capital’', he would have done so in three lines.
Del pensare breve (1991)
How can we still bear to call ourselves living—we who are dying!
Del pensare breve (1991)
The truth, the task of those who deal with philosophy, is not the dialogue between two people who philosophize, but a silent nod that is addressed to the designated victim.
La morte del sole (1982)
The beautiful lies in the very moment when one senses that beauty is no longer. Forever now, perhaps.
La morte del sole (1982)
One's own cognitive destiny (not the ‘letter on the subject’) leads far away. Asking a question and reading a book—what could be more foolish?
Trattato dell'empietà (1987)
The first comer who wants to have his say boasts the right to independent thought, which he has been educated to believe in. Let him speak: he will hang himself.
Del pensare breve (1991)
True, society should save us from the universe that swallows us up. But what saves us from society?
Dell'indifferenza in materia di società (1994)
We forgive those who have offended us because that evens the score: one offense each. But the latter is deadly.
Del pensare breve (1991)
The task of theodicy was accomplished at the very moment it disappeared, not because it failed but because it succeeded completely. In the final analysis, it made the very notion of evil disappear.
Dialogo teologico (1993)
We know the ‘reductio’ of all things in God by another name. In those who die, the infernal force, or, let's put it this way, the dear old essence of the world, is revealed ‘eo ipso’.
Trattato dell'empietà (1987)
Socrates dies because he broke the law. It is foolish to say that he was a gentleman, says Hegel rightly. If a philosopher is someone who pits the individual against the world, we cannot help but feel repugnance, he adds.
Dialogo sul comunismo (1995)
Discos are little nirvanas where the solemn roar of rock music allows the son of Siddhartha to savor the little nothingness. To not be for a little while is all that is asked. Little ‘nothings’ that the life of today's individual needs in order to be reborn and live another week.
La conoscenza del peggio (1982)
He saw Paris as a set of ideas. To think in this city is to think it, he said. And for a time, he devoted his self to it.
Quaternario (2006)
I am not an intellectual, I am a cleric. An intellectual is someone who takes sides with extremely political values. A cleric, on the other hand, is someone who strives to follow values that are universal.
True discipline in matters of the intellect is a ruthless intransigence against the spirit of discussion. Every concession made in the name of mutual equality is a betrayal of the truth, over which courtesy prevails. Thinking divides.
Del pensare breve (1991)
We drag ourselves through the streets at night and talk to ourselves. Dialogue flourishes during the day and echoes with its ignoble dealings. At night, we monologue. Like kings.
Del pensare breve (1991)
Hegel called it spirit, we call it culture. Culture is a negative definition, a jumble of things, made for the most varied purposes, not to provide us with a concept of spirit. Ernst Cassirer wrote “For a Philosophy of Culture,” but it was a masked, reduced, debased philosophy of spirit.