Quotes about philosopher (1720 quotes, page 9)

“No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat.
The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"Moods of Washington" (p.38)
So This Is Depravity (1980)

People , Justice

“There are only two kinds of arguments for euthanasia. The first is based on owning your life. Already in the last century, some philosophers and novelists began to talk of suicide as the ultimate act of self-control or self-possession. That is, of course, an illusion, for death is the surrender of all control or possession; and killing oneself is always an act of despair. It means a person has given up all hope. The second kind of argument is based on escaping from suffering. In actual fact, pain control is so far advanced now that suffering can be alleviated in almost all cases. The fear of suffering, however, creates a strong case for accepting a “right to die.””

Francis George (1937–2015) Catholic cardinal

Right or no right, we will all die. The basic question, therefore, is always: since I must die, what is the meaning of life?
"Cardinal's Column", The Catholic New World (December 27, 1998)

Life , Death , Pain , Fear

““How do you reconcile materialism with idealism?” Whenever I hear a philosophical question like that, I think “Here we go. We’re going to use smoke and mirrors to change the subject and thus avoid it.””

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

Question , Thinking , Change

“In this Bicentennial Year, we are commemorating the anniversary dates of many great events in American history. An honest reckoning, however, must include a recognition of our national mistakes as well as our national achievements. Learning from our mistakes is not pleasant, but as a great philosopher once admonished, we must do so if we want to avoid repeating them.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

1970s, Proclamation 4417 (1976)

History , Learning

“It may be relevant here to recall gratefully a fraternal correction I was kindly offered by the Archimandrite Ambrosius of the Greek Orthodox Church. After listening to a lecture I delivered at Oxford University some years ago, he gently chided me (in private, not in public) for not perceiving the difference between the brand of Hellenism affecting Western theology that had absorbed the philosophical thought of ancient Greece, and the Hellenism of Eastern Orthodox theology which had assimilated the spiritual praxis of their non-Christian ancestors. Mulling over this critical observation of his, I came to understand why our scholastic tradition has not given importance to what Greek Orthodox spirituality has named nepsis (vigilance), which is its own technical term for mindfulness.”

Aloysius Pieris (1934) Sri Lankan Jesuit priest

Source: "Spirituality as Mindfulness: Biblical and Buddhist Approaches", p. 39

Understanding , Universe

“Cicero is hardly to be reckoned … for he delighted so much more in the practice, than in the theory, of his art, that he is perpetualy drawn off from the rigid philosophical analysis of its principles, into discursive declamations, always eloquent indeed, and often highly interesting, but adverse to regularity of system, and frequently as unsatisfactory to the practical student as to the Philosopher.”

Richard Whately (1787–1863) English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian

Introduction, p. 19
Elements of Rhetoric (1828)

Art

“Nazi philosophers also commonly expressed concerns about cruelty toward animals. In early 1933, Nazi representatives in the Prussian parliament called for legislation banning vivisection.”

Robert N. Proctor (1954) American historian

Source: Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, 1988, p. 277

Animals

“How easy it is, Doctor, to be a philosopher on paper, and how hard it is in life!”

Anton Chekhov The Seagull

Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!
Act IV http://books.google.com/books?id=ENtYy7K9UmIC&q=%22%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BA+%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%BA%D0%BE+%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80+%D0%B1%D1%8B%D1%82%D1%8C+%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BE%D1%84%D0%BE%D0%BC+%D0%BD%D0%B0+%D0%B1%D1%83%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B3%D0%B5+%D0%B8+%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BA+%D1%8D%D1%82%D0%BE+%D1%82%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%BE+%D0%BD%D0%B0+%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%22&pg=PT51#v=onepage
The Seagull (1896)

Life

“In the winter of 1841 Schelling gave his famous series of lectures at the University of Berlin before a distinguished audience including Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Engels, Bakunin. Schelling set out to overthrow Hegel, whose vast rationalist system including the identification of abstract truth with reality and the bringing of all history into an “absolute whole,” held immense and dominant popularity in the Europe of the middle of the nineteenth century. – 1844 Kierkegaard published Philosophical Fragments, and two years later he wrote the declaration of independence for existentialism, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. Also in 1844 there appeared the second edition of Schopenhauer’s The world as will and idea,.. central emphasis “will” along with “idea” -- two related works by Marx 1844-45 – “attacked abstract truth’ as “ideology” “using Hegel as his whipping boy” “men and groups bring truth into being” “money economy turns people into things””

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 54

Men , Money , People , Truth

“It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Source: Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance (1964), p. 2

Wisdom

“They're putting the cart before the horse on this pornography issue. Playboy doesn't cause sexual thoughts. There are sexual thoughts, and, therefore, there is Playboy. Don't you see? I know these sound like deep philosophical questions, "What came first, the hard-on or the Madonna video?" and "If a hard-on falls in the forest, do you go blind?"”

Bill Hicks (1961–1994) American comedian

and "What does an atheist scream when they come?"
Relentless (1992)

Question , Horse

“These Thoughts, my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ’till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at Liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought an accurate Philosopher.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Peter Collinson, September 1753.
1750s

Communication , Knowledge , Science , Time

“Some fundamental unity was surely to be discerned either in the matter or the structure of things. The Ionic philosophers chose the former field: Pythagoras took the latter. …The geometry which he had learnt in Egypt was merely practical. …It was natural to nascent philosophy to draw, by false analogies, and the use of a brief and deceptive vocabulary, enormous conclusions from a very few observed facts: and it is not surprising if Pythagoras, having learnt in Egypt that number was essential to the exact description of forms and of the relations of forms, concluded that number was the cause of form and so of every other quality. Number, he inferred, is quantity and quantity is form and form is quality.
Footnote2 Primitive men, on seeing a new thing, look out especially for some resemblance in it to a known thing, so that they may call both by the same name. This developes a habit of pressing small and partial analogies. It also causes many meanings to be at attached to the same word. Hasty and confused theories are the inevitable result.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Men , Nature , Drawing , Falseness

“A philosophical problem of no importance or meaning,” Joe said. “And incapable of being proved one way or the other.”

Philip K. Dick book Ubik

Source: Ubik (1969), Chapter 9 (p. 115)

Way , Problem

“You will find that there is no other difference of opinion as regards any portions of the Universe, except that the philosophers believe in the Eternity of the Universe and we believe in the Creation. Note this.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

Universe

“Whatever God desires to do is necessarily done; there is nothing that could prevent the realisation of His will. The object of His will is only that which is possible, and of the things possible only such as His wisdom decrees upon. When God desires to produce the best work, no obstacle or hindrance intervenes between Him and that work. This is the opinion held by all religious people, also by the philosophers; it is also our opinion. For although we believe that God created the Universe from nothing, most of our wise and learned men believe that the Creation was not the exclusive result of His will; but His wisdom, which we are unable to comprehend, made the actual existence of the Universe necessary. The same unchangeable wisdom found it as necessary that non-existence should precede the existence of the Universe. Our Sages frequently express this idea in the explanation of the words, "He hath made everything beautiful in his time" (Eccl. iii. 11)… This is the belief of most of our Theologians; and in a similar manner have the Prophets expressed the idea that all parts of natural products are well arranged, in good order, connected with each other, and stand to each other in the relation of cause and effect; nothing of them is purposeless, trivial, or vain; they are all the result of great wisdom. …This idea occurs frequently; there is no necessity to believe otherwise; philosophic speculation leads to the same result; viz., that in the whole of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary, especially in the nature of the spheres, which are in the best condition and order, in accordance with their superior substance.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.25

Wisdom , Men , God , People

“I think all aesthetic judgments—all the aesthetic choices we are making—are moral choices. They cannot escape the moral dimension in the broader sense. It has to relate to the philosophical understanding of who we are and how so-called “art and culture” functions in today’s world.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2000-09, Escape from Propaganda, 2009

World , Art , Understanding , Thinking

“The sole "property" of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside the mind.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Reality

“"Thinking is easy," said Goethe, "acting is difficult, and to put one's thought into action is the most difficult thing in the world." And Tolstoy: "It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writing than to put one principle into practice."”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Thinking

World , Thinking

“Man has many wishes that he does not really wish to fulfil, and it would be a misunderstanding to suppose the contrary. He wants them to remain wishes, they have value only in his imagination; their fulfilment would be a bitter disappointment to him. Such a desire is the desire for eternal life. If it were fulfilled, man would become thoroughly sick of living eternally, and yearn for death. In reality man wishes merely to avoid a premature, violent or gruesome death. Everything has its measure, says a pagan philosopher; in the end we weary of everything, even of life; a time comes when man desires death. Consequently there is nothing frightening about a normal, natural death, the death of a man who has fulfilled himself and lived out his life.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Lecture XXX, Atheism alone a Positive View
Lectures on the Essence of Religion http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/lectures/index.htm (1851)

Life , Death , Disappointment , Imagination

“There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.”

Peter Medawar (1915–1987) scientist

"Hypothesis and Imagination" (Times Literary Supplement, 25 Oct 1963)
1960s

People , Way

“With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls' minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible and then to marry in one's own village, near one's own relatives, and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 107

Children , Girl , Lovers

“His [Sarpi's] career soon revealed another cause of his return; he evidently felt the same impulse which stirred his contemporaries, Lord Bacon and Galileo, for he began devoting himself to the whole range of scientific and philosophical studies, especially to mathematics, physics, astronomy, anatomy, and physiology. In these he became known as an authority, and before long was recognized as such throughout Europe. It is claimed, and it is not improbable, that he anticipated Harvey in discovering the circulation of the blood, and that he was the forerunner of noted discoverers in magnetism. Unfortunately the loss of the great mass of his papers by the fire which destroyed his convent in 1769 forbids any full estimate of his work; but it is certain that among those who sought his opinion and advice were such great discoverers as Acquapendente, Galileo, Torricelli, and Gilbert of Colchester, and that every one of these referred to him as an equal, and indeed as a master.”

Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 4-5

Mathematics , Study , Loss

“A cat is the ideal literary companion. A wife, I am sure, cannot compare except to her disadvantage. A dog is out of the question. It may do at a butcher's – it would be out of place in a bookseller's. A cat for a bookseller is a different creature temperamentally from the same animal at a fishmonger's or a baker's. In these shops the cat is a useful animal – I suppose it is employed to eat fish entrails or to keep down rats and mice – but in my shop its function is that of a familiar. It is at once decorative – contemplative – philosophical, and it begets in me great calm and contentment.”

William Darling (politician) (1885–1962) Scottish politician

Source: The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947), p. 48

Dogs , Cats , Question , Fish

“Gradually, during the eighteenth century, physicists and philosophers had become so accustomed to Newton's law of gravitation, and to the equality of gravitational and inertial mass, that the miraculousness of it was forgotten and only an acute mind like Bessel's perceived the necessity of repeating those experiments. By the experiments of Bessel about 1830 and of Eötvös in 1909 the equality of gravitational and inertial mass has become one of the best ascertained empirical facts in physics.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Law

“Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

A 713, B 741
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Mathematics , Knowledge

“I must here acknowledge that the best naturall philosophic that I ever coulde learn in this point, was neither out of Aristotle's Physicks, nor Velcurie's Naturall Philosophy, nor garseous meteors, nor out of any of the olde philosophicall fathers, that writ so many hundred years past; but that little which I have, I gathered it on the backside of Moore fieldes, where, by sundrie undoubted argument, I did heare it maintained, that all the elementes doo onely differ in attenuation and condensation: so as earth beeing attenuated becommeth water; and water condensate, becommeth earth; water attenuated becommeth aier, and aier condensate becommeth water; and so likewise aier attenuated becommeth fire, and fire condensate becommeth aier; and thus all of them spring from one roote, which being admitted is a manifeste proofe that there is a greate and neere affinity betweene the lande and the sea, wherein we shall finde salte water enough for our purpose.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Spring , Learning , Water , Bee

“There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another… The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

B 22
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook B (1768-1771)

Life , God , Way

“…during a period in history psychology was still a branch of academic philosophy. The psychological concepts developed by philosophers of mind, such as “dominant ideas” (akin to the automatic thoughts of Beck’s cognitive therapy) “habit and association” (a subjective precursor of Pavlovian conditioning), and “imitation and sympathy” (which we now call “role-modelling” and “empathy”), are repeatedly mentioned by Braid as the theoretical framework upon which his science of hypnotism, “neuro-hypnology”, was built. Braid’s friend and collaborator, Prof. William B. Carpenter, discusses the theoretical principles of this in his Principles of Mental Physiology (1889), especially in the chapter ‘Of Common Sense’ which concludes by quoting an approving letter from the philosopher John Stuart Mill sent to Carpenter in 1872. Mill agrees with Carpenter’s contention that “common sense”, by which he means a kind of intellectual intuition analogous to the ancient Greek concept of nous, is a combination of innate and acquired judgements, which have a “reflexive” or “automatic” quality and appear to consciousness as “self-evident” truths.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

James Braid, in The Original Philosophy of Hypnotherapy (from The Discovery of Hypnosis) http://ukhypnosis.wordpress.com/category/james-braid-the-founder-of-hypnotherapy/page/2/.

Truth , Quotes , History , Idea

“Thought depends on the habitual exercise of the speculative faculties; action, on the determination of the will. The one assigns reasons for things, the other puts causes into act. … Such is the effeminacy of the speculative and philosophical temperament, compared with the promptness and vigour of the practical! … Reasoners in general are undecided, wavering, and sceptical, or yield at last to the weakest motive as most congenial to their feeble habit of soul.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Thought and Action"
Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Exercises , Soul , Motivation , Dependency

“Experts have a vested interest in their own playpens, and so they will quite naturally argue that 'education' is impossible without them (can you imagine an Oxford philosopher, or an elementary particle physicist arguing himself out of good money?)”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

Science in a Free Society (1978)

Money , Education , Imagination , Nature

“The great man of science, unless he is also a philosopher, … deserves the title of genius as little as the man of action.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Source: Sex and Character (1903), pp. 139-140.

Science

“Kuhn had the genius to find the words and sketch the concepts that made important old philosophical problems relevant to the public and newly discussable by philosophers. He had the strength of mind and commitment to lead the discussion. He could speak the truly incommensurable languages of physics, philosophy, and history, all necessary to frame and advance his epistemological quest. He wrote, as one of his admirers, Margaret Masterman, put it, in a "quasi-poetic style," sometimes veiled, sometimes with "rhetorical exaggeration," but always after careful and even painful thought. Or, to switch metaphors, he drew the portrait of science in the manner of the Impressionists. At a distance, where most viewers stand, the portrait appears illuminating, persuasive, and inspiring; close in, where historians and philosophers stare, it looks sketchy, puzzling, and richly challenging.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

Pain , History , Problem , Appearance

“I really have no claim to rank myself among fatalistic, materialistic, or atheistic philosophers. Not among fatalists, for I take the conception of necessity to have a logical, and not a physical foundation; not among materialists, for I am utterly incapable of conceiving the existence of matter if there is no mind in which to picture that existence; not among atheists, for the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1870s, On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History (1874)

God , Nature , Problem , Reading

“With a rush of joy, I realized that this Darwinist stance would appeal neither to secular Marxists, for whom moral lessons lay exclusively within history’s brute curriculum, nor to evangelical Christians, for whom a naturalist ethics was a contradiction in terms, nor to middle-class mystics, who detested any argument smacking of biological determinism. A philosophical position that could simultaneously antagonize the collectivist left, the God-besotted right, and the Aquarian fringe must, I decided, have a lot going for it.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 1 (p. 4)

God , History , Joy

“Oh, philosophers may sing
Of the troubles of a King,
But of pleasures there are many and of worries there are none;
And the culminating pleasure
That we treasure beyond measure
Is the gratifying feeling that our duty has been done.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Gondoliers (1889)

Pleasure , Feeling , Singing

“When the great religious and philosophical conceptions were alive, thinking people did not extol humility and brotherly love, justice and humanity because it was realistic to maintain such principles and odd and dangerous to deviate from them, or because these maxims were more in harmony with their supposedly free tastes than others. They held to such ideas because they saw in them elements of truth, because they connected them with the idea of logos, whether in the form of God or of a transcendental mind, or even of nature as an eternal principle.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 34.

Love , God , People , Truth

“It is a nation of contradictions, sir. Consider this: Ireland is an island nation that has never developed a navy; a music-loving people who have produced only those harmless lilting ditties as their musical legacy; a bellicose people who have never known the sweet savor of victory in a single war; a Catholic country that has never produced a single doctor of the Church; a magnificently beautiful country, a country to inspire artists, but a country not yet immortalized in art; a philosophic people yet to produce a single philosopher of note; a sensual people who have never mastered the art of preparing food.”

Pat Conroy The Lords of Discipline

p 274. Said by character Colonel Edward T. Reynolds.
The Lords of Discipline (1980)

Love , War , People , Food

“I don’t confuse abstract philosophical concepts with reality.”

Ann Leckie book Ancillary Justice

Source: Ancillary Justice (2013), Chapter 4 (p. 54)

Reality

“Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher.”

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) English historian

" The Influence Of Women On The Progress Of Knowledge http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/u-rel/buckle.html". Lecture given at the Royal Institution 19 March 1858. In: The Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (1872)

Idea , Knowledge

“Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the mail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)

Way , Time , Training

“The next time I met Ludwig Wittgenstein was in the spring of 1928 when the economist Dennis Robertson, who was taking me for a walk through the Fellows' Gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge, suddenly decided to change course because on the top of a little rise he perceived the form of the philosopher draped over a deckchair. He evidently stood rather in awe of him, and he did not wish to disturb him.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

" Remembering My Cousin, Ludwig Wittgenstein https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug-00020", Encounter ( August 1977 https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1977aug). Page 21.
1960s–1970s

Spring , Change , Time

“Rousseau has said in his Emile (book iv.): "Even though philosophers should be in a position to discover the truth, which of them would take any interest in it? Each one knows well that his system is not better founded than the others, but he supports it because it is his. …The essential thing is to think differently from others. With believers he is an atheist; with atheists he is a believer."”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

How much substantial truth there is in these gloomy confessions of this man of painful sincerity.
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality

Pain , Truth , Books , Support

“There are some places which, seen for the first time, yet seem to strike a chord of recollection. "I have been here before," we think to ourselves, "and this is one of my true homes." It is no mystery for those philosophers who hold that all which we shall see, with all which we have seen and are seeing, exists already in an eternal now; that all those places are home to us which in the pattern of our life are twisting, in past, present and future, tendrils of remembrance round our heart-strings.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XV: "Eunice Makes a Clean Breast of It"

Life , Home , Thinking , Time

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Life , People , Age , World

“I have seen several ups and downs in my life. I have seen several detractors in my life. Why should I bother about that? In my 40 years in politics I have passed through such events and I don't want to take these things seriously. I will take things philosophically.”

H. D. Deve Gowda (1933) Indian politician

Source: R R Nair "The Rediff Election Interview/H D Deve Gowda"

Life

“We have found that our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of letters have been optimists in their books and in their lives. No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius, and many optimistic writers have been read and admired out of all measure to their talents, simply because they wrote of the sunlit side of life.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

Life , Men , Books , Reading

“I am whole-heartedly in favour of the profession learning more about the history of [information transfer]. We have a tendency to focus on the newest forms of information provision … neglecting the continued existence and continuing importance of all the previous forms… But our profession is not that of the historian (or sociologist or philosopher) interesting as their work may be.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information history – an introduction (2009), p. 246.

History , Learning

“The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

p 40
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

People , World

“For the Greeks who believed in the immortality of the soul it may have been harder to accept the Christian preaching of the resurrection than it was for others.. . . The teaching of the great philosophers Socrates and Plato can in no way be brought into consonance [agreement] with that of the New Testament.”

Oscar Cullmann (1902–1999) French theologian

Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, p. 59

Way , Soul

“The direction in which science will move is set by the philosophic world view of the scientists.”

Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984) American theologian

How Should We Then Live : The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (1976), Chapter 1, Ancient Rome

World , Science

“Spinoza is the Christ of philosophers, and the greatest philosophers are hardly more than apostles who distance themselves from or draw near to this mystery.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (cited in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/deleuze.htm#SH3b)
A - F, Gilles Deleuze

Christ , Drawing

“At present they [philosophers] seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 3
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

“Though the churches, in general, abstained from interfering officially, the scientific activities of the physicists have always been influenced by their private religious views. The latter, of course, were not necessarily identical with the ecclesiastical doctrines, but the philosophical attitudes of the scientists were affected, at least to some extent, by the prevailing religious thought. Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton freely acknowledged this influence; it played a part in the principle of least action in the eighteenth century. After this period, in which Kant's philosophy proclaimed the complete independence of scientific understanding and religious belief, not much more about it is found in physical writings. However, this by no means signifies that the investigational urge of later scientists was not intimately connected with their religiosity. The tenet that the scientific experience of truth in any sense is "theoria," i. e., a view of God, might be said sincerely about the best of them. The search for knowledge without regard to its applicability for use has been "an essential trait of man through the centuries, a sign of his higher origin."”

Max von Laue (1879–1960) German physicist

[Max von Laue, History of physics, Academic Press Inc, 1950, http://www.archive.org/details/historyofphysics030356mbp, 3-5]

God , Truth , Search , Understanding

“A country's strategy is always based on a fundamental philosophical outlook. Discoveries made during the last hundred years have shown that liberalism is the best system to improve a country's well being - This is why Andorra's strategy is based on a liberal way of thinking”

Marc Forné Molné (1946) Andorran politician

At [[wikipedia:Liberal International Congress|

Way , Thinking , Country

“Only when they must choose between competing theories do scientists behave like philosophers.”

Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) American historian, physicist and philosopher

Thomas Kuhn (1970) in Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research?, edited by [Imre Lakatos, Alan Musgrave, Criticism and the growth of knowledge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, 0521096235, 7]

“For a philosophy based on faith is no longer philosophy. Perhaps it was this unresolved conflict which has prevented Western thought from ever coming to rest. Perhaps it is this conflict which is at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy. It is in trying to understand modern philosophy that we come across Machiavelli. Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of 'expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends-its end being the ag grandizement of one's country or fatherland-but also using the father land in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party.”

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) Classical philosophy specialist and father of neoconservativism

"Niccolo Machiavelli" (1987)

Faith , Understanding , Country

“According to Lewis, the dehumanization threatened by the mastery of nature has, at its deepest cause, less the emerging biotechnologies that might directly denature bodies and flatten souls, and more the underlying value-neutral, soulless, and heartless accounts that science proffers of living nature and of man. By expunging from its account of life any notion of soul, aspiration, and purpose, and by setting itself against the evidence of our lived experience, modern biology ultimately undermines our self-understanding as creatures of freedom and dignity, as well as our inherited teachings regarding how to live — teachings linked to philosophical anthropologies that science has now seemingly dethroned.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life , Soul , Understanding , Nature

“Cruel, cruel tricks of the Adversary. I had been gifted with a mind that wanted to explore, to find out, to know. And I had been gifted with faith. And now I had been gifted with information that put fact and faith into conflict. I had not been gifted with a priest’s slippery dexterity when it came to reconciling the philosophically irreconcilable.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 96 (p. 348)

Faith

“Mathematics and philosophy are cultivated by two different classes of men: some make them an object of pursuit, either in consequence of their situation, or through a desire to render themselves illustrious, by extending their limits; while others pursue them for mere amusement, or by a natural taste which inclines them to that branch of knowledge. It is for the latter class of mathematicians and philosophers that this work is chiefly intended j and yet, at the same time, we entertain a hope that some parts of it will prove interesting to the former. In a word, it may serve to stimulate the ardour of those who begin to study these sciences; and it is for this reason that in most elementary books the authors endeavour to simplify the questions designed for exercising beginners, by proposing them in a less abstract manner than is employed in the pure mathematics, and so as to interest and excite the reader's curiosity. Thus, for example, if it were proposed simply to divide a triangle into three, four, or five equal parts, by lines drawn from a determinate point within it, in this form the problem could be interesting to none but those really possessed of a taste for geometry. But if, instead of proposing it in this abstract manner, we should say: "A father on his death-bed bequeathed to his three sons a triangular field, to be equally divided among them: and as there is a well in the field, which must be common to the three co-heirs, and from which the lines of division must necessarily proceed, how is the field to be divided so as to fulfill the intention of the testator?"”

Jean-Étienne Montucla (1725–1799) French mathematician

This way of stating it will, no doubt, create a desire in most minds to discover the method of solving the problem; and however little taste people may possess for real science, they will be tempted to try iheir ingenuity in finding the answer to such a question at this.
Source: Preface to Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. (1803), p. ii; As cited in: Tobias George Smollett. The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature http://books.google.com/books?id=T8APAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA410, Volume 38, (1803), p. 410

Death , Men , People , Books

“The same ‘ practical’ viewpoint is dominant in Marx’ s conception of the cognitive functions of the mind and its role in the historical process; ‘ practical’ is always regarded as implying ‘ social’, and ‘ social life is practical by its very essence’. So is the task of philosophy as defined in the eleventh Thesis, in what are perhaps Marx’ s most-quoted words: ‘ The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.’ It would be a caricature of Marx’ s thought to read this as meaning that it was not important to observe or analyse society and that only direct revolutionary action mattered. The whole context shows that it is a formula expressing in a nutshell the viewpoint of ‘ practical philosophy’ as opposed to the ‘ contemplative’ attitude of Hegel or Feuerbach – the viewpoint which Hess, and through him Cieszkowski, suggested to Marx and which became the philosophical nucleus of Marxism. To understand the world does not mean considering it from outside, judging it morally or explaining it scientifically; it means society understanding itself, an act in which the subject changes the object by the very fact of understanding it.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Source: Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume I, The Founders, pp. 143-4

Life , World , Way , Quotes

“Constitutions do not emerge perfectly formed from the brain of the philosopher king, as Mr. Trudeau himself discovered in 1980 and 1981. They are always messy processes that are easier to knock down or tear apart than they are to construct.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter Seven, The Three Questions and the Question of Canada, p. 158

Tear

“If we study Japanese art, you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass..”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in Vincent's letter to brother Theo, from Arles, Sept. 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 542), p. 39
1880s, 1888

Art , Intelligence , Study , Grass

“Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalist system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort, from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of Geneva and New England.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

War

“Philosophers who have wanted to banish the ghost from the machine have usually sought to do so by showing that truths about behavior can sometimes, and in some sense, logically implicate truths about mental states. In so doing, they have rather strongly suggested that the exorcism can be carried through only if such a logical connection can be made out. … [O]nce it has been made clear that the choice between dualism and behaviorism is not exhaustive, a major motivation for the defense of behaviorism is removed: we are not required to be behaviorists simply in order to avoid being dualists.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Fodor (1986) "Why Paramecia Don’t Have Mental Representations," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10: 3-23. cited in: Bradley Rives " Jerry A. Fodor (1935 – ) http://www.iep.utm.edu/fodor/" Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Oct. 25, 2010

Truth , Behavior , Motivation , Sense

“R. W. K. Paterson makes a central point of identifying Stirner with nihilism. His argument depends on a failure to distinguish between social values, which Stirner does reject, and personal values, to which he is more overtly committed than any other philosopher.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 108, note

Failure , Dependency , Personality

“University professors, restricted in this way, are quite happy about the matter, for their real concern is to earn with credit an honest livelihood for themselves and also for their wives and children and moreover to enjoy a certain prestige in the eyes of the public. On the other hand, the deeply stirred mind of the real philosopher, whose whole concern is to look for the key to our existence, as mysterious as it is precarious, is regarded by them as something mythological, if indeed the man so affected does not even appear to them to be obsessed by a monomania, should he ever be met with among them. For that a man could really be in dead earnest about philosophy does not as a rule occur to anyone, least of all to a lecturer thereon; just as the most sceptical Christian is usually the Pope. It has, therefore, been one of the rarest events for a genuine philosopher to be at the same time a lecturer in philosophy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Inzwischen bleiben die solchermaaßen beschränkten Universitätsphilosophie bei der Sache ganz wohlgemuth; weil ihr eigentlicher Ernst darin liegt, mit Ehren ein redliches Auskommen für sich, nebst Weib und Kind, zu erwerben, auch ein gewisses Ansehn vor den Leuten zu genießen; hingegen das tiefbewegte Gemüth eines wirklichen Philosophen, dessen ganzer und großer Ernst im Aufsuchen eines Schlüssels zu unserm, so rätselhaften wie mißlichen Daseyn liegt, von ihnen zu den mythologischen Wesen gezählt wird; wenn nicht etwa» gar der damit Behaftete, sollte er ihnen je vorkommen, ihnen als von Monomanie besessen erscheint. Denn daß es mit der Philosophie so recht eigentlicher, bitterer Ernst seyn könne, läßt wohl, in der Regel, kein Mensch sich weniger träumen, als ein Docent derselben; gleichwie der ungläubigste Christ der Papst zu seyn pflegt. Daher gehört es denn auch zu den seltensten Fällen, daß ein wirklicher Philosoph zugleich ein Docent der Philosophie gewesen wäre.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 153, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 141
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Children , Way , Universe , Appearance

“Nothing of that which is conducive to help man, collectively or individually, to live — not "happily" — but less unhappily in this world, ought to be indifferent to the Theosophist-Occultist. It is no concern of his whether his help benefits a man in his worldly or spiritual progress; his first duty is to be ever ready to help if he can, without stopping to philosophize.”

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) occult writer

Source: Collected Writings, vol. XI, p. 465 (October 1889) http://www.katinkahesselink.net/blavatsky/articles/v11/y1889_065.htm

World , Help , Indifference

“Metaphors of space have always been introduced into painting, the play of fullness and emptiness, volumes, surfaces, light and shade... And, in recent painting, in particular, the notion of 'emptiness' has assumed great significance... This interest in emptiness, in nothingness, is found in many disciplines, in particular in an important sector of modern philosophy. We know, for example, that the philosophers such as Heidegger or Sartre have, at a given moment, made nothingness the center of their thought…”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

In 'Celebració de la mel', Antoni Tàpies, in La peinture et le vide, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1993, p. 41 –46
1991 - 2000

Light , Painting

“We've associated that word philosophy with academic study that in its own way has gotten so far beyond the layman that if you read contemporary philosophy you've no clue, because it's almost become math. And it's odd that if you don't do that and you call yourself a philosopher that you always get 'homespun' attached to it.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

Robert Fulghum : Philosopher King

Way , Study , Reading

“Political thought as we understand it began in Athens because the Athenians were a trading people who looked at their contemporaries and saw how differently they organized themselves. If they had not lived where they did and organized their economic lives as they did, they could not have seen the contrast. Given the opportunity, they might not have paid attention to it. The Israelites of the Old Testament narrative were very conscious of their neighbors, Egyptian, Babylonian, and other, not least because they were often reduced to slavery or near-slavery by them. That narrative makes nothing of the fact that Egypt was a bureaucratic theocracy; it emphasizes that the Egyptians did not worship Yahweh. The history of Old Testament politics is the history of a people who did their best to have no politics. They saw themselves as under the direct government of God, with little room to decide their own fate except by obeying or disobeying God’s commandments. Only when God took them at their word and allowed them to choose a king did they become a political society, with familiar problems of competition for office and issues of succession. For the Jews, politics was a fall from grace. For the Greeks, it was an achievement. Many besides Plato thought it a flawed achievement; when historians and philosophers began to articulate its flaws, the history of political thought began among the argumentative Athenians.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Herodotus?

God , Fate , People , History

“Of late, men seem to have been possessed by an incomprehensible impulse to strip themselves of everything with which nature has endowed them in order to make them superior to the beasts of burden. A philosopher is a gentleman who sits down four times a day to the best meals he can possibly obtain, and who considers that virtue, glory and noble sentiments should be indulged in only when they do not interfere with those four indispensable functions and all the rest of his little personal comforts. At this rate, a mule is a better philosopher by far, because in addition to all this he puts up with blows and hardship without complaint.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote, 29 April 1824 (p. 35)
1815 - 1830, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1822 – 1824)

Men , Nature , Time , Personality

“[ John Rawls's] Theory of Justice begins with this assertion: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust …. Truth and justice are uncompromising” (p. 3). How, one might ask. do we know that justice has this preeminence? Rawls’s second basic claim is that we have a particular kind of access to this preeminence: we have an “intuitive conviction of the primacy of justice” (p. 4) over all other considerations including welfare, efficiency, democratic choice, transparency, dignity, international competitiveness, or freedom, and, of course, over any rooted moral, philosophical, or religious conceptions. There is no account of where these intuitions came from, whether they might be in any way historically or sociologically variable, or what role they play in society.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 70-71.

Truth , Justice , Law , Way

“If philosophy does not resolve any scientific problem, science, in its turn, does not resolve any philosophical problem.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito (1992)

Problem , Science

“The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions).

One can understand why such a declaration baffled people at first. But after giving it a little thought and failing to find any proof of the strange propositions, any rational person ought to throw the books aside and wonder if there is any kind of rubbish that would not find a publisher today. But this has not happened with Nietzsche´s books. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously look into the theory of the Übermensch, and acknowledge its author to be a great philosopher, a descendant of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. And all this has come about because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of today object to any reminder of virtue, or to its chief premise: self-renunciation and love—virtues that restrain and condemn the animal side of their life. They gladly welcome a doctrine, however incoherently and disjointedly expressed, of egotism and cruelty, sanctioning the idea of personal happiness and superiority over the lives of others, by which they live.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: What is Religion, of What does its Essence Consist? (1902), Chapter 11

Love , Life , Men , People

“The philosopher considering the Universe in its entirety is led to admit that there is only one necessary, absolute being, God. All other beings are contingent; this is why Pascal said of himself: "I feel that I might not have been… therefore I am not a necessary being" (Pensées, No. 597). The proposition applies equally to every living thing.”

Pierre-Paul Grassé (1895–1985) French zoologist

Grassé, Pierre Paul (1977); Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation. Academic Press, p. 172
Evolution of living organisms: evidence for a new theory of transformation (1977)
Original: Le philosophe, considérant l'univers dans son intégralité, est conduit à n'admettre qu'un seul être nécessaire, absolu, Dieu. Tous les autres sont contingents; c'est pour cela que Pascal disait de lui-même : « Je sens que je puis n'avoir pas été... donc je ne suis pas un être nécessaire » (Pensées, 597). Cette proposition s'applique avec autant de justesse à tout être

God , Feeling , Universe

“If we can recover the naturalistic ambitions of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, … philosophy becomes relevant because the world—riven as it is with hypocrisy and concealment—desperately needs a hermeneutics of suspicion to unmask it. And by taking these three seminal figures of the Continental traditions as philosophical naturalists we show their work to be continuous with the naturalistic turn that has swept Anglophone philosophy over the past several decades. … The antipathy to naturalism often thought to be constitutive of “the Continental tradition” is simply an artifact of cutting the joints of that tradition in certain places.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

World , Nature , Past

“In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“The Power of the Word,” p. 37.
Language is Sermonic (1970)
Variant: In recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.

“It has been a long time since philosophers have read men's souls. It is not their task, we are told. Perhaps. But we must not be surprised if they no longer matter much to us.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Men , Soul , Time , Reading

“Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) French phenomenological philosopher

Source: In Praise of Philosophy (1963), p. 44

World , Search , Motivation

“I believe in limited government. I believe that government should be limited in many ways, and what I am going to emphasize is only an intellectual thing. I don't want to talk about everything at the same time. Let's take a small piece, an intellectual thing.No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literary or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

lecture II: "The Uncertainty of Values"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

Truth , Way , Question , Freedom

“The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

On his seventieth birthday (1926); as quoted in The Liberal Imagination (1950) by Lionel Trilling
1920s

Study

“When it comes to philosophical convictions, most conservatives more closely resemble their beltway liberal friends than Republican Party voters. From the country's dismal finances and propagandized population, a sizable segment has concluded that conservative power-brokers and liberal power-brokers are indistinguishable.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Trump Doesn’t Need to Talk Like A Conservative," http://www.unz.com/imercer/trump-doesnt-need-to-talk-like-a-conservative/ The Unz Review, March 19, 2016.
2010s, 2016

Country

“The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Werner Erhard on L. Ron Hubbard — quoted in [L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?, 1987, Bent Corydon and Ronald DeWolf, 15, 0818404442]
Attributed

“Plato (427-347 B. C.) in his philosophical writings, stressed the inner psychological reality in contrast to the reality of the external world. He believed that the human soul consists of three parts. 1) The rational soul, which resided in the brain. 2) The anima soul, controlling emotions and passions, was located in the chest. 3) The vegetative soul, controlling physiological needs, was located in the abdomen, When dreams occurred in sleep, the irrational soul reasserted themselves.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, (1990), p. 23

World , Dreams , Soul , Reality

“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”

Stendhal book The Red and the Black

Étrange effet du mariage, tel que l'a fait le XIXe siècle! L'ennui de la vie matrimoniale fait périr l'amour sûrement, quand l'amour a précédé le mariage. Et cependant, dirait un philosophe, il amène bientôt chez les gens assez riches pour ne pas travailler, l'ennui profond de toutes les jouissances tranquilles. Et ce n'est que les âmes sèches parmi les femmes qu'il ne prédispose pas à l'amour.
Vol. I, ch. XXIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Love , Life , Women , Marriage

“There were many Hayeks: Hayek, the political scientist; Hayek, the economist; Hayek, the philosopher of social science; Hayek, the psychologist. Even in these different roles, he played many parts.”

Mark Blaug (1927–2011) British economist

Hayek revisited (1993)

Science , Parting

“Einstein's theory has the very highest degree of æsthetic merit: every lover of the beautiful must wish it to be true. It gives a vast unified survey of the operations of nature, with a technical simplicity in the critical assumptions which makes the wealth of deductions astonishing. It is a case of an advance arrived at by pure theory: the whole effect of Einstein's work is to make physics more philosophical (in a good sense), and to restore some of that intellectual unity which belonged to the great scientific systems of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but which was lost through increasing specialization and the overwhelming mass of detailed knowledge. In some ways our age is not a good one to live in, but for those who are interested in physics there are great compensations.”

Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) Dutch physicist

p, 125
Theory of Relativity: A Concise Statement (1920)

Age , Beauty , Way , Lovers

“Some philosophers—and those to whom we are indebted for the most stupendous discoveries in physical science, suppose… that intelligence is the mere result of certain combinations among the particles of its objects; and those among them who believe that we live after death, recur to the interposition of a supernatural power, which shall overcome the tendency inherent in all material combinations, to dissipate and be absorbed into other forms.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death , Intelligence , Science

“It is a greatness not of mere body and gigantic bulk, but a rude greatness of soul. There is a sublime uncomplaining melancholy traceable in these old hearts. A great free glance into the very deeps of thought. They seem to have seen, these brave old Northmen, what Meditation has taught all men in all ages, That this world is after all but a show,—a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing. All deep souls see into that,—the Hindoo Mythologist, the German Philosopher,—the Shakspeare, the earnest Thinker, wherever he may be.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Men , Age , World , Soul

“Though they [philosophers] write contemptu gloriæ, yet as Hieron observes, they will put their names to their books.”

Robert Burton book The Anatomy of Melancholy

Section 2, member 3, subsection 14.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part I

Books

“Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death…”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 28

Life , Death , Universe

“Natural historians tend to avoid tendentious preaching in this philosophical mode (although I often fall victim to such temptations in these essays). Our favored style of doubting is empirical: if I wish to question your proposed generality, I will search for a counterexample in flesh and blood. Such counterexamples exist in abundance, for they form a staple in a standard genre of writing in natural history — the “wonderment of oddity” or “strange ways of the beaver” tradition.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Reversing Established Orders", p. 394
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

Way , History , Search , Question

“There is a philosophical, or metaphysical position that can be taken–maybe its a scientific hypothesis–that the past cannot in fact exist. Everything that can possibly exist exists now. Things now may be expressive of some conceivable or describable past state of affairs, yes:but that's different from saying this this former state actually somehow exists in the form of "the past". Even in our memory[…]there is no past:no scenes preserved with all their sights and sounds. Merely fleeting states of mind, myriad points assembled for a moment to make a new picture (but "picture" is wrong too, too full, too fixed) of what we think are former states of things: things that once were, or may have been the case.”

John Crowley book Four Freedoms

Prelude
Four Freedoms (2009)

Thinking , Memory , Past

“As a teacher of philosophy, a very dubious profession in this country, I am in a position to observe how precarious a hold the intellect has upon American life; and this is not true merely of the great majority of students but of cultured people, of intellectuals, to whom here in America a philosophical idea is an alien and embarrassing thing. In their actual life Americans are not only a non-intellectual but an anti-intellectual people.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Eleven, The Place Of The Furies, p. 238

Life , People , Idea , Teachers

“Darwin grasped the philosophical bleakness with his characteristic courage. He argued that hope and morality cannot, and should not, be passively read in the construction of nature. Aesthetic and moral truths, as human concepts, must be shaped in human terms, not “discovered” in nature. We must formulate these answers for ourselves and then approach nature as a partner who can answer other kinds of questions for us—questions about the factual state of the universe, not about the meaning of human life. If we grant nature the independence of her own domain—her answers unframed in human terms—then we can grasp her exquisite beauty in a free and humble way. For then we become liberated to approach nature without the burden of an inappropriate and impossible quest for moral messages to assuage our hopes and fears. We can pay our proper respect to nature's independence and read her own ways as beauty or inspiration in our different terms.”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"Art Meets Science in The Heart of the Andes", p. 109
I Have Landed (2002)

Life , Truth , Fear , Beauty

“There were women in the golden age of Greece, called hetaerae, who were celebrated by Socrates and philosophers of his time. Although they existed solely for their own pleasure and that of men, they were respected for their independence of mind and spirit and thought of highly by the Greeks. Single women in today's world can function like hetaerae, learning from many and giving back to whom they will, and for the woman who enjoys such a life, it can be a good one, and one both she and society can be the better for.”

Merle Shain (1935–1989) Canadian writer

Some Men are More Perfect Than Others (1973)

Life , Women , Men , Pleasure

“Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Imagination , Failure

“This film is extremely visual. It is difficult to describe in words without running the risk of losing or boring the reader.
I have come up with a simplified summary, therefore, like a readers guide, which will conjure up the images in as few words as possible :
— the beginning is Leon: The Professional
— the middle is Inception
— the end is 2001: A Space Odyssey
Don't interpret this as pretension on my part, merely a visual, emotional and philosophical point of reference.”

Luc Besson (1959) French film director, writer, and producer

"NOTA", for his film Lucy, as quoted in "Luc Besson's Statement Of Intent For 'Lucy' Compares The Film To '2001,' 'Inception' & 'Leon The Professional'" by Kevin Jagernauth, in Indiewire (28 July 2014) http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/luc-bessons-statement-of-intent-for-lucy-compares-the-film-to-2001-inception-leon-the-professional-20140728

Parting

“The Philosopher of this age is not a Socrates, a Plato, a Hooker, or Taylor, who inculcates on men the necessity and infinite worth of moral goodness, the great truth that our happiness depends on the mind which is within us, and not on the circumstances which are without us; but a Smith, a De Lolme, a Bentham, who chiefly inculcates the reverse of this,—that our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances; nay, that the strength and dignity of the mind within us is itself the creature and consequence of these. Were the laws, the government, in good order, all were well with us; the rest would care for itself! Dissentients from this opinion, expressed or implied, are now rarely to be met with; widely and angrily as men differ in its application, the principle is admitted by all.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Men , Truth , Age , Law

Quotes about philosopher page 9

Quotes about philosopher
page 9