Philosophy will fail forever its primary aim because it searches for something that does not exist.

Philosophy's error is to be too endurable.

Philosophy seems to me on the whole a rather hopeless business.

Professed scientific philosophers have been wont to employ the remoter and refinished products of science in ways which deny, discount or pervert the obvious and immediate facts of gross experience, unmindful that thereby philosophy itself commits suicide.

In certain intellectual circles in France, the very basis for discussion—a minimal respect for facts and logic—has been virtually abandoned.

Philosophy … finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.

Instead of elaborating on accepted principles, let us simply point out that for the last hundred years the natural sciences have abandoned completely the Aristotelian principles of intuition, inspiration, and dogmatism.

Philosophy … lost its prestige to the extent that it lost its evident advantage in cleverness to "normal life." In the transition from archaic teachings of wisdom to philosophy based on argument, it itself was engulfed in the twilight of alienation from life. It had to accept that the independent cleverness theories of pragmatics, economics, strategy, and politics proved themselves to be its better, until, with its logical niceties, it became infantile and academic, and stood there as the Utopian idiot with its reminiscences about great ideals. Today philosophy is surrounded on all sides by maliciously clever empiricisms and realistic disciplines that "know better."

For the purpose of acquiring gain, everything else is pushed aside or thrown overboard, for example, as is philosophy by the professors of philosophy.

Philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away. It is then trespassing with the wrong equipment upon the field of particular sciences. Its ultimate appeal is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational societyt must find its place in philosophic theory. Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic, and before fact. It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but
merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities.

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

By capitulating to life, this world has betrayed nothingness. . . . I resign from movement, and from my dreams. Absence! You shall be my sole glory. . . . Let "desire" be forever stricken from the dictionary, and from the soul! I retreat before the dizzying farce of tomorrows. And if I still cling to a few hopes, I have lost forever the faculty of hoping.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.

The denial of becoming by physics estranged science from philosophy... [and] became a dogmatic assertion directed against all those (chemists, biologists, physicians) for whom a qualitative diversity existed in nature... Today we believe that the epoch of certainties and absolute oppositions is over. Physicists belong to their culture, to which, in their turn, they make an essential contribution.