Quotes about philosophy (2093 quotes, page 15)

“The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird.”

Simon Blackburn (1944) British academic philosopher

Introduction, p. 1
Think (1999)

“Have we not hereditary possessions in our just laws, our free and nobly developed constitution, our rich literature and philosophy, incomparably above material wealth, and which we are beyond all things bound to maintain, improve, and hand down in safety? And do we accomplish this duty in encouraging a growth of industry which must prove unstable, and perhaps involve all things in its fall?”

William Stanley Jevons book The Coal Question

The Coal Question (1865)

Law , Literature , Wealth

“Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 68: About "Why folk Psychology is a theory."

Sense

“In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe.
One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Physics in my generation (1956)

Love , War , Children , Religion

“Nietzsche's problem is how to be a philosopher once he has grasped the finitude of philosophy.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 5, Nietzsche's Styles, p. 96

Problem

“Once one learns how to speak a language, the authority of the language has fulfilled its aim, but is not thereby overcome. Authority remains as the entry to the inquiry one has undertaken. It is not overcome or passed by so much as it is actualized, fulfilled. That is why philosophic reformations seem too often to be nested within what it is they seek to reform. Insofar as it begins from its predecessor, every attempted reformation is only the confession of the authority of its predecessor's discourse. The appearance of abrupt 'revolutions' in philosophy is produced only by ignoring, sometimes ingenuously, the authority of previous speech.”

Mark D. Jordan (1953)

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

Learning , Appearance

“I possess only a single bare, frame-less icon [his Squares ] of our times (like a pocket), and it is difficult to struggle. But my happiness in not being like you [ Aleksandr Benois ] will give me the strength to go further and further into the empty wilderness. For it is only there that transformation can take place. And I think you are mistaken when you say in reproaching me that my philosophy will destroy millions of lives. Are you not, all of you, like a roaring blaze that obstructs and prevents any forward movement?”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote in: 'Letter from K. Malevich to art-critic Aleksandr Benois', May 1916; by Jane A, Sharp, in Chapter 'The Critical Reception of the 0. 10 Exhibition: Malevich and Benua', in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 44
1910 - 1920

Thinking , Time , Happiness

“The greatest enjoyment possible to man was that which this philosophy promises its votaries—the pleasure of being always right, and always reasoning—without ever being bound to look at anything.”

Walter Bagehot book The English Constitution

No. VII, Its Supposed Checks and Balances, p. 250
From SHAKESPEARE: THE INDIVIDUAL, quote attributed to Bagehot says: "The greatest pleasure in life is doing what other people say you cannot do."
The English Constitution (1867)

Pleasure

“Number was born in superstition and reared in mystery,… numbers were once made the foundation of religion and philosophy, and the tricks of figures have had a marvellous effect on a credulous people.”

Francis Wayland Parker (1837–1902) Union Army officer

Source: Talks on Pedagogics, (1894), p. 64. Reported in Moritz (1914, 269)

People , Religion

“In 1968 Ian Wilson made his final sculpture. Since then, he has explored the idea of oral communication as an art form… Wilson’s work is very hard to track down, even in terms of documentation. He has been compared to the Socratic philosophers but if there is a similarity between his practice and theirs, it probably lies mainly in the fact that everything we have from that period of philosophy takes the form of secondary fragments embedded in other texts. Wilson’s work functions almost like archaeological or geological evidence: it consists of objects that we examine in order to deduce, from scanty clues, what must have happened.”

Edward Allington (1951–2017) sculptor

Edward Allington. " About Time http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/about_time/," in Frieze, Issue 92 June-August 2005

Art , Communication , Idea

“Isaac Newton deserves to be included in a series of companions to major philosophers even though he was not a philosopher in the sense in which Descartes, Locke, and Kant were philosophers. That is, Newton made no direct contributions to epistemology or metaphysics that would warrant his inclusion in the standard list of major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant – or even in a list of other significant philosophers of the era – Bacon, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Wolff, and Reid. The contributions to knowledge that made Newton a dominant figure of the last millennium were to science, not to philosophy.”

I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) American historian of science

Source: The Cambridge Companion to Newton, 2002, p. 1

Knowledge , Sense , Science

“Robbed of a foundation of political philosophy on which (how ever illegitimately) it had based itself, economics is in great danger of becoming a plaything of demagogy.”

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden (1907–2005) British economist

Conclusion, p. 414
A History of Economic Thought (1939)

“Up to Descartes' time, and particularly during the Middle Ages, it had always been agreed that philosophy consisted in a transposition of reality into conceptual terms”

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) French historian and philosopher

Methodical Realism

Age , Reality , Time

“Von Bertalanffy's Ph. D. thesis was on the philosophy of, an epigon of the Philosophy of Nature movement, who was also the founder on psychophysics and experimental esthetics, Fechner, like all the other Philosophers of Nature rejected the reductionist-atomist view of nature. He believed that the universe was a living system existing at a higher level than man. It was governed in addition to the law of causality by the laws of 'stability' and of 'repetition.' These three principles causality, stability and repetition governed biological and psychological phenomena.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 3

Law , Nature , Universe

“The trouble is with socialism, which resembles a form of mental illness more than it does a philosophy. Socialists get bees in their bonnets. And because they chronically lack any critical faculty to examine and evaluate their ideas, and because they are pathologically unwilling to consider the opinions of others, and most of all, because socialism is a mindset that regards the individual — and his rights — as insignificant, compared to whatever the socialist believes the group needs, terrible, terrible things happen when socialists acquire power.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Cambodian Road Trip," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle510-20090315-02.html 15 March 2009.

Idea , Bee

“Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

"James Clarence Mangan" (1902)

Age

“Laura Knoy: Now how does this noninterventionist philosophy play out when it's a humanitarian crisis like genocide in Darfur, Sudan?
Ron Paul: …it should be done voluntarily. I have no right – no moral right or constitutional right – to come with a gun and tax the people and say: "I will take money because I want to do good" … there's warring factions going on there, it's a civil war… You could've argued that in Somalia as well … And the American people are generous – there's no reason why we can't help feed the world, and we do. But there's no justification to use violence against our people to extract money to do good overseas.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016
2000s, 2006-2009

Money , War , People , World

“After logic we must proceed to philosophy proper. Here too we have to learn from our predecessors, just as in mathematics and law. Thus it is wrong to forbid the study of ancient philosophy. Harm from it is accidental, like harm from taking medicine, drinking water, or studying law.”

Averroes (1126–1198) Medieval Arab scholar and philosopher

Ch 1.9
The Decisive Treatise

Law , Mathematics , Drink , Study

“A real atheist, needless to say, will disregard what the dervishes think it expedient to say about the "New Testament" when they make their pitch to the ignorant. He will read the myths for himself and objectively consider and appraise them as a whole, including the social gospel that is, indeed, the most important and operative part of them. And he will shudder at the Judaic malevolence that inspires them, the vicious hatred of culture and civilization. They were designed to create a foul and squalid world in which every instinctive value of our race is negated and aborted--a world in which the natural ties of family and property have been severed, leaving only rootless and helpless individuals, isolated and lost in the terrible loneliness of crowds--a world without history, without philosophy, without science, without reason--a world without beauty of any kind, without art, without literature, without culture--a world without real love, the love that unites men and women, and without even the Aryan's instinctive feeling for the beauty of women and physical health.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

"The Bear in the Bush", Liberty Bell (September 1990)
1990s

Love , Women , Men , Health

“For their doctrine is this: That bodies are corruptible, and that the matter they are made of is not permanent; but that the souls are immortal, and continue forever; and that they come out of the most subtile air, and are united to their bodies as to prisons, into which they are drawn by a certain natural enticement; but that when they are set free from the bonds of the flesh, they then, as released from a long bondage, rejoice and mount upward. And this is like the opinions of the Greeks, that good souls have their habitations beyond the ocean, in a region that is neither oppressed with storms of rain or snow, or with intense heat, but that this place is such as is refreshed by the gentle breathing of a west wind, that is perpetually blowing from the ocean; while they allot to bad souls a dark and tempestuous den, full of never-ceasing punishments. And indeed the Greeks seem to me to have followed the same notion, when they allot the islands of the blessed to their brave men, whom they call heroes and demi-gods; and to the souls of the wicked, the region of the ungodly, in Hades, where their fables relate that certain persons, such as Sisyphus, and Tantalus, and Ixion, and Tityus, are punished; which is built on this first supposition, that souls are immortal; and thence are those exhortations to virtue and dehortations from wickedness collected; whereby good men are bettered in the conduct of their life by the hope they have of reward after their death; and whereby the vehement inclinations of bad men to vice are restrained, by the fear and expectation they are in, that although they should lie concealed in this life, they should suffer immortal punishment after their death. These are the Divine doctrines of the Essens about the soul, which lay an unavoidable bait for such as have once had a taste of their philosophy.”

Josephus on the Essenes

Jewish War

Life , Death , Men , God

“Philosophy is the art of saying something incredibly stupid and making it sound incredibly intelligent.”

Piero Scaruffi (1955) Italian writer

Piero Scaruffi quotes (as selected by his readers) http://www.scaruffi.com/quotes.html

Stupidity , Art , Intelligence

“As for the matter of my judicial philosophy, I didn't have one- and didn't want one. A philosophy that is imposed from without instead of arising organically from day-to-day engagement with the law isn't worth having. Such a philosophy runs the risk of becoming an ideology, and I'd spent much of my adult life shying away from abstract ideological theories that served only to obscure the reality of life as it's lived.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Page 238
2000s, (2008)

Life , Law , Reality

“Correctly understood, the phrase “tyranny of values” may supply the key to the understanding that all thinking about values only foments and intensifies the old and endless struggle between convictions and interests. Not much is gained by what the modern philosophy of values acknowledges as the “fundamental relationship,” according to which, occasionally the lower value may be preferred to the higher value, because that is the prerequisite of the higher value. All that points only to the confusion that affects the whole argumentation about values, which continually gives rise to new relations and points of view, thereby the position is always maintained from which the opponent is reproached that he does not heed the manifest values; or, in other words, he is disqualified as value-blind. The polemical utilization of the word “blind” is adequate to the logic of values as long as it is concerned with the systems of reference that it will build up out of viewpoints, standpoints, and vantage-points.”

Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) German jurist, political theorist and professor of law

"The Tyranny of Values" (1959)

Understanding , Thinking

“Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize — make seem natural — the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not from the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as part of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination over others… Most fundamentally, I would see Anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life , God , People , World

“What, then, shall we do? someone may ask. What else, indeed, than devote ourselves to the care of our souls, keeping all our leisure free from other things. Accordingly, we should not be slaves of the body, except so far as is strictly necessary; but our souls we should supply with all things that are best, through philosophy freeing them, as from a prison, from association with the passions of the body.”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

Source: On Greek Literature, p. 415

Soul , Passion

“Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 45

Literature , Science

“For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons… The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence.”

Aldous Huxley book Ends and Means

Ends and Means (1937)

Men , People , World , Way

“There is no muse of philosophy, nor is there one of translation.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

"The Task of the Translator," translated by Harry Zohn

“The great critic … must be a philosopher, for from philosophy he will learn serenity, impartiality, and the transitoriness of human things.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Summing Up

Source: The Summing Up (1938), p. 223

Learning

“Isn’t a miserable reality better than the most interesting illusion? Or is it illusion, Barney? I don’t know anything about philosophy; you explain it to me because all I know is religious faith and that doesn’t equip me to understand this.”

Philip K. Dick book The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Source: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Chapter 8 (p. 143)

Faith , Understanding , Reality

“The Smithsonian Institute has 33,000 sets of human remains in their basement … Many of them were taken while the people were still alive. They were so desperate to find missing links, so desperate to prove their theory that they murdered people to prove it. It was the philosophy of evolution that drove them.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution (1996)

People

“Optimism is a philosophy based on the belief that basically life is good, that, in the long run, the good in life overbalances the evil.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Have a Great Day (1986), p. 14

Life , Optimism , Evil

“I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with demonology and supporting the mythology of Satan, which involves God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever - I think it's a destructive philosophy.”

David Cronenberg (1943) Canadian film director, screenwriter and actor

David Cronenberg's Body Language http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/magazine/18cronenberg.html?pagewanted=all (September 18, 2005)

God , Hell , Support , Problem

“to show that [the success of my portray-] photographs was not due to subject matter – not to special trees or faces, or interiors, to special privileges – clouds were there for everyone... I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in forty years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life... My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen – and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'How I came to Photograph Clouds', Alfred Stieglitz, in 'Amateur Photographer and Photography', (19 September 1923): 255.
about his new subject: 'clouds' in his long series 'Equivalents' he started in 1922

Life , Tree , Learning , Success

“A true philosopher does not engage in vain disputes about the nature of motion; rather, he wishes to know the laws by which it is distributed, conserved or destroyed, knowing that such laws is the basis for all natural philosophy.”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

Law , Nature

“A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. There exists some book, pamphlet, article in an encyclopaedia, or possibly an old clipping from a newspaper that once set you thinking; there may be many; indeed you may be one of those rare beings with whom a few lines of print are food enough or thought because, as Lamartine says, their thoughts think themselves. The sometimes evocative for you may be poetry, history, philosophy, the sciences, or moral sciences, i. e. the progress of mankind. Some people who go to sleep over a volume will be interested by a review which they think more condensed or better within their reach. Read reviews if they help you to think, that is. to say if they leave in your mind images that will go on living when you have forgotten where they came from. Read a Shakespeare calendar at the rate of four lines a day, if Shakespeare quotations have on you the magic influence they have on some people; read algebra, read the lives of great inventors or of great businessmen, read that kind of books which you and nobody else know to be thought-productive for you.”

Ernest Dimnet (1866–1954) French writer

Source: The Art of Thinking (1928), p. 122

People , Books , Food , History

“Almost the whole of Greek science and philosophy begins with Thales.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

Source: Achimedes (1920), Ch. II. Greek Geometry to Archimedes, p.8

Science

“I had before me the product of two mutually exclusive philosophies. Economism would insist that having made the perfect pencil, Thoreau should make more pencils and sell them for money with which to buy more material to make still more pencils to sell for money to buy still more material, and so on, because the making and selling of pencils is the whole content of life. Thoreau did not believe it is the whole content of life. It was clear that economism's philosophy was the only one which my companion was capable of accepting. Detach him from his particular specialised practice of it, and existence would have no further meaning for him; and in this he was representative of the great bulk of society in this present age.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 173

Life , Money , Age , Perfection

“The science of religion is one science within philosophy; indeed it is the final one. In that respect it presupposes the other philosophical disciplines and is therefore a result.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher

Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, Volume 1 (1827)

Religion , Science

“We need more meetings like this across the nation. The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy.”

Trent Lott (1941) United States Senator from Mississippi

To the CCC (1992), as quoted in The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi http://www.pdfarchive.info/pdf/N/Ne/Newton_Michael_-_The_Ku_Klux_Klan_in_Mississippi.pdf (2010), by Michael Newton, p. 195.
1990s

People

“All things change, creeds and philosophies and outward systems — but God remains.”

Mary Augusta Ward book Robert Elsmere

Robert Elsmere. Book iv. Chap. xxvi, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

God , Change

“The story of Job shocks the heart of every good man. In this book there is some poetry, some pathos, and some philosophy, but the story of this drama called Job, is heartless to the last degree. The children of Job are murdered to settle a little wager between God and the Devil. Afterward, Job having remained firm, other children are given in the place of the murdered ones. Nothing, however, is done for the children who were murdered.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide? (1900)

God , Children , Books , Heart

“We argue that the problem is not to "abandon"Marxism or to "annul" it, but to transcend it dialectically, just as Marx transcended Hegelian philosophy, Ricardian economics, and Blanquist tactics and modes of organization.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Listen, Marxist!

Problem

“Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, ‘I think therefore I am,” now raises him to say … “I think, therefore I am not,” (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action).”

Julien Benda (1867–1956) French essayist

Source: Treason of the Intellectuals (1927), p. 149

Feeling , Thinking

“Johnson represents a clear and coherent economic and political philosophy that conservative and libertarian economists can understand and support if they choose.”

Brent Budowsky (1952) American journalist

In shock poll, Libertarian Johnson beats Trump among economists (August 23, 2016)

Understanding , Support

“I had the image of a spiritual person, but I was bowing down to the idols of religiosity and philosophy.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Personality

“What is science? yard-measure and scale to philosophy, expert-accountant, bank clerk. What is poetry? miserable, ill-fed, underpaid, unionized labourer, pleased to oblige, grateful for work, flattering himself that poverty makes him an aristocrat.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"This Philosophy" from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Science

“One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Man hat nur so viel Moral, als man Philosophie und Poesie hat.
“Selected Ideas (1799-1800)”, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, trans. (Pennsylvania University Press:1968) #62

“My views are more akin to the nineteenth-century liberal philosophy espoused by Milton Friedman, especially in his Capitalism and Freedom. In that work, he proposed many policies that are harmonious with free markets and are receiving serious attention in the United States and other countries. This list includes school choice, the flat-rate income tax, rules for monetary stability, privatized social security, and the elimination of affirmative-action programs.”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Getting It Right (1997); Introduction

School , Freedom , Country

“The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence. Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age.”

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

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Three, The Testimony Of Modern Art, p. 57

Age

“Speculative philosophy as the realisation of God is the positing of God, and at the same time his cancellation or negation; theism and at the same time atheism: for God – in the sense of theology – is God only as long as he is taken to be a being distinguished from and independent of the being of man as well as of nature. The theism that as the positing of God is simultaneously his negation or, conversely, as the negation of God equally his affirmation, is pantheism. Theological theism – that is, theism properly speaking – is nothing other than imaginary pantheism which itself is nothing other than real and true theism.”

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) German philosopher and anthropologist

Part I, Section 14
Principles of Philosophy of the Future http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/future/index.htm (1843)

God , Nature , Sense , Time

“I love philosophy. It's fascinating to try to discover how perception, or experience, or memory works. I've always been a diehard relativist at heart, and I find it very interesting to read other people's philosophical ideas and how they see the world through their particular lens.”

Andrew Sega (1975) musician from America

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

Love , People , World , Idea

“I have been blessed to see my work flourish. Many people in history — Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X — never lived to see their work flourish. I have seen people around the world embrace my philosophy and principles, involving themselves in a cultural institution that my organization and I created. That's something.”

Maulana Karenga (1941) Political activist

"The Man Who Invented Kwanzaa" in Ebony (January 1998)

People , World , History

“The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 12 The Alleviation of Poverty

Freedom , Light , Heart

“The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)

Death , Women , People , Religion

“Paradox is thus a much deeper and universal concept than the ancients would have dreamed. Rather than an oddity, it is a mainstay of the philosophy of science.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Source: Labyrinths of Reason (1988), Chapter 1: "Paradox", p. 23

Dreams , Universe , Science

“What I admire in the ancient philosophers is their desire to make their lives conform to their writings, a trait which we notice in Plato, Theophrastus and many others. Practical morality was so truly their philosophy's essence that many, such as Xenocrates, Polemon, and Speusippus, were placed at the head of schools although they had written nothing at all. Socrates was none the less the foremost philosopher of his age, although he had not composed a single book or studied any other science than ethics.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Ce que j'admire dans les anciens philosophes, c'est le désir de conformer leurs mœurs à leurs écrits: c'est ce que l'on remarque dans Platon, Théophraste et plusieurs autres. La Morale pratique était si bien la partie essentielle de leur philosophie, que plusieurs furent mis à la tête des écoles, sans avoir rien écrit; tels que Xénocrate, Polémon, Heusippe, etc. Socrate, sans avoir donné un seul ouvrage et sans avoir étudié aucune autre science que la morale, n'en fut pas moins le premier philosophe de son siècle.
Maximes et Pensées (Van Bever, Paris : 1923), #448
Maxims and Considerations, #448

Books , Age , School , Study

“This new philosophy, however, was far from giving the temporal an inherent position and function in the constitution of things. Change was acting on the side of man but only because of fixed laws which governed the changes that take place. There was hope in change just because the laws that govern it do not change.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Law , Hope , Change

“To describe means to classify, and the man Poincaré defies classification, as does indeed his philosophy.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 1. The Iconoclast

“M. Comte's philosophy, in practice, might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.”

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

"On the Physical Basis of Life" (1868) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE1/PhysB.html
1860s

“The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), pp. 27-28

Intelligence

“One important reason for studying philosophy is that it deals with fundamental questions about the meaning of our existence.”

Nigel Warburton (1962) British author and lecturer

Philosophy : the basics (Fifth Edition, 2013), Introduction

Question , Study

“The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1957) Segments of the economy, 1956, a symposium: the Fifth Economics-in-Action Program sponsored jointly by Republic Steel Corporation and Case Institute of Technology
1950s

“I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

Philip Roth (1933–2018) American novelist

As quoted in "Roth on Trump" by Judith Thurman, in The New Yorker (30 January 2017), p. 17

Art , History , Science

“This is bliss, This is bliss, This is bliss, I proclaim
The real happiness lies in the chant of Lord’s name.
One should be on the banks of river of life firm like rocks along,
One should be a powerful bow in the midst of the strong.
One should softly adore Lord’s greatness in heart within,
Be like a lump of sugar to his kith and kin
One should keep correcting wisely his body and mind.
And pay respects to the great and sages kind.
One should be like fish in the Madhva philosophy ocean,
And be pure in his practice of the Triple Expression”.
One should ever be alert to grasp knowledge that abound,
And think of Lord (Sri Hari) night and day around.
One should pay respects to the servants of the Lord,
Purnadar Vittala the God of this world.”

Purandara Dasa (1484–1564) Music composer

In the above quote, Dasa gives some fundamentals for leading life in the community. Translation quoted from this [Narayan, M.K.V., Lyrical Musings on Indic Culture: A Sociology Study of Songs of Sant Purandara Dasa, http://books.google.com/books?id=-r7AxJp6NOYC&pg=PA79, 1 January 2010, Readworthy, 978-93-80009-31-5, 7]

Life , God , World , Knowledge

“In this precise sense, Kant was "the inventor of the philosophical history of philosophy": there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, that is, one cannot directly get at the truth, one cannot begin wit it, philosophy necessarily began with metaphysical illusions. The path from illusion to its critical denunciation is the very core of philosophy, which means that successful ("true") philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.”

Slavoj Žižek (1949) Slovene philosopher

Introduction
Less Than Nothing (2012)

Truth , History , Sense , Success

“Any question of philosophy … which is so obscure and uncertain, that human reason can reach no fixed determination with regard to it; if it should be treated at all; seems to lead us naturally into the style of dialogue and conversation.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Pamphilus to Hermippus, Prologue
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Question , Nature

“It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all.
This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

"China and the Federal Union" an address at the Federal Union organization, New York City (April 1942) http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/Buck/excerpt-fu.html

School , History , Literature

“Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from 'The History of Landscape Painting,' fourth lecture, Royal Institution (16 June 1836), from John Constable's Discourses, ed. R.B. Beckett, (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1970), p. 69.
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Law , Nature , Science , Painting

“We spent them not in toys, in lusts, or wine,
But search of deep philosophy,
Wit, eloquence, and poetry;
Arts which I lov'd, for they, my friend, were thine.”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

On the Death of Mr. William Harvey; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Art , Search , Wine

“Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life. One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy. Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy. A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government. It is the distinction of Spinoza that his ethic unconsciously reconciles these apparently hostile philosophies, weaves them into a harmonious unity, and gives us in consequence a system of morals which is the supreme achievement of modern thought.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961)
A - F

Love , Life , Men , Hostility

“Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women—foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried.”

David Brin book Startide Rising

Source: Startide Rising (1983), Chapter 23 (p. 141)

Women , Men , Law , Nature

“Historically, "public administration" has grown in large part out of the wider field of inquiry, "political science." The history of American political science during the past fifty years is a story much too lengthy to be told here, but some important general characteristics and tendencies it has communicated to or shared with public administration must be noted.
The Secular Spirit Despite: the fact that "political science" in such forms as moral philosophy and political economy had been taught in America long before the Civil War, the present curriculum, practically in its entirety, is the product of the secular, practical, empirical, and "scientific" tendencies of the past sixty or seventy years. American students dismayed at the inadequacies of the ethical approach in the Gilded Age, stimulated by their pilgrimage to German universities, and led by such figures as J. W. Burgess, E. J. James, A. B. Hart, A. L. Lowell, and F. J. Goodnow have sought to recreate political science as a true science. To this end they set about observing and analyzing "actual government." At various times and according to circumstances, they have turned to public law, foreign institutions, rural, municipal, state, and federal institutions, political parties, public opinion and pressures, and to the administrative process, in the search for the "stuff" of government. They have borrowed both ideas and examples from the natural sciences and the other social disciplines. Frequently they have been inspired by a belief that a Science of Politics will emerge when enough facts of the proper kinds are accumulated and put in the proper juxtaposition, a Science that will enable man to "predict and control" his political life. So far did they advance from the old belief that the problem of good government is the problem of moral men that they arrived at the opposite position: that morality is irrelevant, that proper institutions and expert personnel are determining.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 22-23

Life , Men , War , Age

“I am a conservative. I intend to give the American people a clear choice. I welcome a fight between our philosophy and the liberal left-wing dogma which now threatens to engulf every man, woman, and child in the United States. I am in this race because I believe the American people have been pushed around long enough and that they, like you and I, are fed up with the continuing trend toward a socialist state which now subjects the individual to the dictates of an all-powerful central government.”

George Wallace (1919–1998) 45th Governor of Alabama

Speech http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1951-/speech-by-george-c-wallace-the-civil-rights-movement-fraud-sham-and-hoax-1964-.php (4 July 1964)
1960s

People , Fight

“Doing philosophy was an opportunity to learn something new. I expected this to be an adjunct to my practice of architecture. But it turned out the other way. It turned out that the philosophy of science gave me the opportunity to design social systems, and I was more interested in people-oriented systems than in buildings. They were both design, but different kinds of design. I like creating things.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff cited in: Carole Novak (2000) " Interview with Russell L. Ackoff http://www.ait.net/technos/tq_09/3ackoff.php". in: Technos Quartely. Fall 2000 Vol. 9 No. 3. This quote is the answer to the question, why Ackoff switched from architecture to philosophy in his graduate studies.
2000s

People , Way , Learning , Science

“Jeanette [Armstrong, "a traditional Okanagan Indian"] said, 'Attitudes about the species communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.' She paused, then continued emphatically, 'It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.'”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

Source: A Language Older Than Words (2000), p. 24

World , Communication

“I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

As quoted in Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing (2002) by by Bart Eeckhout Ch. 12 "Poeticizing Epistemology", p. 268

Beauty

“The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain — whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music, — comprising composition and performance, history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation of averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on 'Hereditary Genius,' that if men are capable of decided eminence over women in many subjects, the average standard of mental power in man must be above that of woman. … Thus man has ultimately become superior to woman.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", pages 327-328 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=344&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Women , Men , Law , Music

“We shall not err in alleging that all things necessary and profitable for life came to us from God, and that philosophy more especially was given to the Greeks, as a covenant peculiar to them, being, as it were, a stepping stone to the philosophy which is according to Christ.”

Clement of Alexandria (150–215) Christian theologian

Miscellanies, VI, 8

Life , God , Christ

“The preceding verse explained that together the three factors: 1) the knowledge (jnanam), 2) the known (jneyam), and 3) the knower (parijnata) motivate action. It was also stated that the organ (karanam), the action (karma), and the agent (karta) execute the action. In this verse the threefold distinction of knowledge, action, and the actor is explain according to the three gunas of Samkhya philosophy.”

Baba Hari Dass (1923–2018) master yogi, author, builder, commentator of Indian spiritual tradition

Srimad Bhagavad Gita, Ch. XIII-XVIII, 2015

Motivation , Knowledge

“The other philosophy of government is based on creation, which says laws come from the Creator, rights are unalienable, and government should be limited. That's called a republic.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Law

“In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Aids to Reflection (1873), Aphorism 1

Truth , Universe

“All Philosophy is Biography”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

Source: Liber Kaos (1992), p. 96

“And when I say the world is governed by nothing but demons, who will continue to be demons until they have destroyed the world, I am not using profanities; on the contrary, demon is a scientific term, a formula covering a specific chemical composition without connotations from politics, religion, or moral philosophy.... Here among us on the lowest rung of the world of life, no attention is paid to books unless they are written by chemically analyzed demons, or at least for them. Poets and philosophers are respected in proportion to the contempt and disgust they feel for the creation of life. Give this day our daily war is the prayer of those who govern countries. Kill, kill, said the outlaw Skuggasveinn...”

Halldór Laxness book Kristnihald undir Jökli (bók)

Dr. Sýngmann
Kristnihald undir Jökli (Under the Glacier/Christianity at Glacier) (1968)

Books , Feeling , Country , Life

“… my dear friend Poverty, nurse of philosophy”

Basil of Caesarea (329–379) Christian Saint

vol. 1, p. 29
Letters

“Science does not stand still, and neither does philosophy, although the latter has a tendency to walk in circles.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Afterword To The 2011 Edition, p. 187
The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981)

Science

“One man I know, and one only, who can be praised for his achievements in this science. Of discourses and battles of words he takes no heed: he follows the works of wisdom, and in these finds rest. What others strive to see dimly and blindly, like bats in twilight, he gazes at in the full light of day, because he is a master of experiment. Through experiment he gains knowledge of natural things, medical, chemical, indeed of everything in the heavens or earth. He is ashamed that things should be known to laymen, old women, soldiers, ploughmen, of which he is ignorant. Therefore he has looked closely into the doings of those who work in metals and minerals of all kinds; he knows everything relating to the art of war, the making of weapons, and the chase; he has looked closely into agriculture, mensuration, and farming work; he has even taken note of the remedies, lot casting, and charms used by old women and by wizards and magicians, and of the deceptions and devices of conjurors, so that nothing which deserves inquiry should escape him, and that he may be able to expose the falsehoods of magicians. If philosophy is to be carried to its perfection and is to be handled with utility and certainty, his aid is indispensable. As for reward, he neither receives nor seeks it. If he frequented kings and princes, he would easily find those who would bestow on him honours and wealth. Or, if in Paris he would display the results of his researches, the whole world would follow him. But since either of these courses would hinder him from pursuing the great experiments in which he delights, he puts honour and wealth aside, knowing well that his wisdom would secure him wealth whenever he chose. For the last three years he has been working at the production of a mirror that shall produce combustion at a fixed distance; a problem which the Latins have neither solved nor attempted, though books have been written upon the subject.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Tertium

Bridges assumes that Bacon refers here to Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt.
Source: Opus Tertium, c. 1267, Ch. 13 as quoted in J. H. Bridges, The 'Opus Majus' of Roger Bacon (1900) Vol.1 http://books.google.com/books?id=6F0XAQAAMAAJ Preface p.xxv

Wisdom , Women , War , Books

“I was now in my sixteenth year, and for the first time it occurred to me that, although conversant with most of the modern languages, I did not understand a word of Latin, and thought the knowledge of this language indispensable to my future prospects in life. I spoke to Rector Steffens, and got permission of my father to leave school entirely, and devote my whole time to the study of Latin. In less than twelve months I was completely master of a language which is often the torment of boys from their sixth to their twentieth years, and still remain ignorant of it. Since then I have written several pamphlets in Latin, which were admired; and in Gottingen my Discourses were generally delivered in that language. Doctor Taube, physician to the king, gave me lessons in natural history, botany, and anatomy; I bade farewell to philosophy and belles lettres, and began in earnest, and with great perseverance, to study physics; but still I was in bad odour amongst many of the learned, and it was said, when they heard of my progress, that henceforth they should not despair of making something of the most stupid of pupils.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Life , Stupidity , School , History

“A guy like Hando is abhorrent to me— the philosophy that governs his life is something that disgusts me completely— so that was an interesting learning experience.”

Russell Crowe (1964) New Zealand-born Australian actor, film producer and musician

On playing a neo-Nazi skinhead in one of his earliest roles.
GQ Interview (2005)

Life , Guy , Learning

“The pure normative standpoint that Kant’s ethics tries to occupy, a standpoint in which we consider only the normatively relevant features of a possible world, abstracting strictly from the real world and the empirical accidents of concrete situations, is an expression of what Dewey called “the quest for certainty.” In an insecure world, weak humans struggle convulsively to reach some kind of stability; the a priori is an overcompensation in thought for experienced human weakness. This is one of the origins of Kant’s notorious rigidity, his authoritarian devotion to “principles,” and his tendency to promote local habits of thought to constituents of the absolute framework in which alone (purportedly) any coherent experience was possible; thus, Euclidean geometry is declared the a priori condition of human experience, and sadistic remnants of Puritanism become demands of pure practical reason. Classical liberalism rejected Kant’s practical philosophy, but perhaps this is not enough. Perhaps one should also reject the very idea of a pure normative standpoint.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Liberalism and its Discontents,” pp. 20-21.
Outside Ethics (2005)

World , Idea

“Among others, Doctor Caritens died during a momentary absence of my father, who recommended while stepping into his travelling chariot, to bleed the Doctor a second time. I did as he bid me, although convinced that emetics and opening medicine would cure the patient without fail; the Doctor died, and you may easily imagine the state of my feelings. I had just begun to publish a work on practical physic, but had no heart to finish it after this sad catastrophe. I betook myself again to philosophy. I wished daily to return to Gottingen, if I could do so with honour. I passed three years under such painful circumstances, when my friend Leisewitz invited me to go with him to Berlin, for which purpose his brother-in-law in Brunswick would advance me money to defray my expenses. Without much consideration, I accepted the invitation, and my portmanteau was soon ready.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

My Life and Confessions, for Philippine, 1786

Money , Pain , Sadness , Law

“Kant’s theory of freedom, and especially the idea that we are free only in the intelligible world beyond nature, has also been the chief stumbling block to the acceptance of his moral philosophy. The scandal has only increased with the passage of time, as fewer and fewer moral philosophers find it tolerable to burden morality with an extravagant supernaturalist metaphysics.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

Kantian Ethics (2008)

World , Intelligence , Idea , Nature

“It was only in the sixth century, after the Emperor Justinian proclaimed that reincarnation was no longer acceptable and would be considered a heretic doctrine, that Christians began to denounce it. The writings of earlier Christians such as Saint Jerome in the fourth century explain that reincarnation was considered an esoteric doctrine that should be understood and defended by Christian philosophy. In the second century, Origen discussed themes of reincarnation in his book titled On First Principles, which is still available in the library today. As we research different scriptures, we can still find hints of reincarnation in all of them.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000), Chapter 1 - The Choice Before Humanity

Books

“Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.”

Eliza Calvert Hall (1856–1935) American author, women's rights advocate and suffragist

Hall, Eliza Calvert. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1907. Aunt Jane's Album p. 82.
Hall, Eliza Calvert, and Melody Graulich. Aunt Jane of Kentucky. Masterworks of literature series. Albany, NY: NCUP, 1992. In the reprinted edition, Graulich discusses the quote on page xxiv.
Aunt Jane of Kentucky (1907)

Love , Life , Death , Religion