The Top Ten Continental Philosophy Quotations

Last week we asked you to tweet our post your favourite Continental Quotations @BloomsburyPhilo – and we had a fantastic response. We’ve already announced the top five on Twitter, but we thought we’d take the time to go through our top ten in a bit more detail, along with a few resources that might be of use to the curious.

"Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths – ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars."

György Lukács, Preface to The Theory of the Novel.

Submitted by @RobertTally.

It’s hard to improve on this poetic formula from one of the founders of Western Marxism. It’s the first line of Lukács’ influential literary treatise, written before his move into Marxism, but even at this early stage in his development one can detect what he later called a ‘romantic anti-capitalism’.

Lukács’ work has been long overdue for a little more of that retrospective analysis, given recent intellectual developments in political theory, aesthetics, ethical theory, and social and cultural theory. In Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics Michael J. Thompson gathers together an international team of contributors to explore contemporary insights into the work of Georg Lukacs in political theory, aesthetics, ethics and social and cultural theory.

‘Profit from the considerable number of strong essays that make their way into the volume.’

- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"But the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster."

David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, Part III, Essay IX ‘Of Suicide’

Submitted by ‏@StrangeMeat ‏

We were pretty skeptical of some of the early entries, but then along came this pithy quotation from the greatest skeptic of them all – David Hume. Besides being an entertaining read, Hume is one of the most influential figures in British philosophy. The intellectual scope and cultural impact of his writing cannot fully be assessed, however, without reference to his European fortunes. Fortunately, The Reception of David Hume In Europe, edited by Peter Jones, is new in paperback!

"The Reception can be read as telling the history of the different lives of Hume's works - the story of the 'making of' what is now, for us, a philosophical classic...And this story needs to be told."  

- Alix Cohen, New Essays on David Hume

"Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age."

G. C. Lichtenberg, The Waste Books (Sudelbücher).

Submitted by‏ @FlormiFasollasi

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was best known for his work as a scientist, but after his death a large collection of aphorisms were found – many of them, like this, fall somewhere between those of the French Moralists and the German Romanticists.

Lichtenberg was to exert a large influence on later thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. You can find his essay, ‘On Physiognomy,’ in German Essays on Science in the 19th Century: Paul Ehrlich, Alexander von Humboldt, Werner Von Sieme, edited by Wolfgang Schirmacher. 

"The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die."

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals

Submitted by @WassimKazzi

Kierkegaard speaks to our need for self-understanding, our need to negotiate the tensions between surprisingly subtle capacities for communication and surprisingly easy descent into clichés and banality. For an evocative guide through Kierkegaard's major themes of fragility, faith, birth, and death, we’d recommend Excursions with Kierkegaard: Others, Goods, Death, and Final Faith by Edward F. Mooney.

'The thing that comes into presence has no interiority. All of its intimacy is its exposition to presence.’

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence

Submitted by Bruno Burton

Jean-Luc Nancy is one of our leading living continental philosophers. As the deft, lightly handled complexity of this quotation suggests, one of his deepest concerns is the importance of togetherness – and of otherness – to the fundamentals of ontology.

His thought is, in many ways, in dialogue with that of Levinas and Heidegger. Daniele Rugo’s new book, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Thinking of Otherness: Philosophy and Powers of Existence, takes up this line of thought, exploring Nancy's opening of otherness at the heart of existence through the transformative thought of Heidegger and Levinas.

"When I begin to ‘write’, I do not write, I snuggle up, I become an ear, I follow a rhythm"

Hélène Cixous, The Portable Cixous

Submitted by @LakeTurner

It was very hard not to award a prize to this quotation. Hélène Cixous is one of our favourite feminist philosophers, and this quote exemplifies all the joy she brings to phallogocentric critique. If you’re at all intrigued (it’d be hard not to be), have a look at The Writing Notebooks.

This is the first publication in any language of Cixous' own notebooks, which illustrating the concept of "écriture féminine" and offer new insights into Cixous' theoretical insistence on writing and her own practice as a writer.

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom”

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Submitted by @eJoelWatts

This quote doesn’t just provide a clear picture of Hegel’s complex philosophical idealism – it also provides a snapshot of German Idealism as a whole. Hegel’s conception of world-historical systems provided the groundwork for Kierkegaard, Marx and the Frankfurt School, and the effect of his thought is still being seen in the work of philosophers today.

If you’re into Hegel, or want to get into Hegel, you'll need The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards. This comprehensive reference guide will allow you access to the key themes, major writings, context and influence of one of the most important figures in 19th Century thought.

'An artfully-organized and exceptionally well-chosen collection of essays by leading North American and European experts in the field. An ideal source and reliable guide for anyone undertaking a study of "the whole Hegel."'

- Dan Breazeale, Professor of Philosophy at University of Kentucky, USA

"I have often enough asked myself, whether on the whole philosophy hitherto has not generally been merely an interpretation of the body, and a misunderstanding of the body"

Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to the second edition of La Gaya Scienza

Submitted by Pierre-Emmanuel Denys

As you might imagine, it was hard to keep Nietzsche out of the top five. He’s always original, challenging and immensely quotable. For followers and fans, we have a new monograph on Nietzsche and Political Thought, edited by Keith Ansell Pearson, that we will be publishing this November.

"I think I am justified in characterizing the four elements as the hormones of the imagination."

Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement

Submitted by@Sphinxforlag

This fantastic quote of Gaston Bachelard, a very underrated philosopher, carries within it a glimpse of his notion of epistemological rupture – the legacy that he handed down to Kuhn, Althusser and Foucault. For a later instantiation of ruptures as an approach to theories of knowledge, keep an eye out for Towards an Epistemology of Ruptures: The Case of Heidegger and Foucault by Arun Iyer, which we will be publishing this January.

Lovers are like "two mirrors facing one another where two indefinite series of images set in one another arise which belong really to neither of the two surfaces, since each is only the rejoinder of the other, and which therefore form a couple, a couple more real than either of them."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

Submitted by Gestur Há Hilmarsson

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is one of the central figures of 20th-century Continental philosophy, and his work has been hugely influential in a wide range of fields. His writings engage in the study of perception, language, politics, aesthetics, history and ontology, and represent a rich and complex network of exciting ideas.

For the serious Merleau-Ponty student we suggest the The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary, edited by Donald A. Landes. This is a thoroughly comprehensive and accessible reference tool that navigates the major works, influences and key concepts of Merleau-Ponty.

‘One of our best Merleau-Ponty scholars, Don Landes has written an invaluable book. The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary provides concise definitions and insightful elaborations of virtually all of Merleau-Ponty’s thematic and operative terms. It also provides useful summaries of Merleau-Ponty’s most important books and articles. The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary is essential reading for anyone working on Merleau-Ponty today.’

- Leonard Lawlor, Sparks Professor of Philosophy, Penn State University

Thank you everyone who took part in the competition – the entries were superb and it was a treat to be able to read them all. We’ll be holding more competitions like this soon, so make sure to follow us @BloomsburyPhilo for your chance to win more great philosophy titles.