“Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be.”

Pearls of Wisdom

Source: The Other Boleyn Girl

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

Source: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Context: No one really starts anything new, Mrs Nemur. Everyone builds on other men's failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.

Source: Intuitions and Summaries of Thought (1862), Volume II, p. 24.

Source: The King's Buccaneer

Source: A New Model of the Universe (1932), p. 33
Context: Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. But where can such a philosophy be found? All that we know in our times by the name of philosophy is not philosophy, but merely "critical literature" or the expression of personal opinions, mainly with the aim of overthrowing and destroying other personal opinions. Or, which is still worse, philosophy is nothing but self-satisfied dialectic surrounding itself with an impenetrable barrier of terminology unintelligible to the uninitiated and solving for itself all the problems of the universe without any possibility of proving these explanations or making them intelligible to ordinary mortals.

Quote of Dupré, c 1844-45; as cited by Charles Sprague Smith, in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye publisher, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 164
Together, Dupré and Theodore Rousseau struggled in vain for five months of 1844 with the constant fathomless azure blue of the southern sky