Philosophical famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. For if there are any questions which science leaves it to philosophy to answer, a straightforward process of elimination must lead to their discovery.
-- A.J. Ayer -
That's an interesting philosophical question. When your boner goes away, is that one gone... forever?
-- Adam Carolla -
The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
-- Adolf Hitler -
Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age, in order to be cured of the Plato sickness, has swallowed such doses of a relativist, vaguely skeptical, lightly spiritualist and insipidly moralist medicine, that it is in the process of gently dying, in the small bed of its supposed democratic comfort.
-- Alain Badiou -
I've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
-- Alan Lightman -
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
-- Albert Camus -
The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
-- Albert Camus -
One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity.
-- Albert Camus -
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein -
When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don't have in my mouth.
-- Albert Einstein -
Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.
-- Albert Schweitzer -
The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.
-- Albert Schweitzer -
We need a boundless ethics which will include animals also.
-- Albert Schweitzer -
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.
-- Aldo Leopold -
Henry's universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They're far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people - even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything.
-- Aldous Huxley -
I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.
-- Aleister Crowley -
Men and women are not free to love decently until they have analyzed themselves completely and swept away every mystery from sex; and this means the acquisition of a profound philosophical theory based on wide reading of anthropology and enlightened practice.
-- Aleister Crowley -
One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, "Is it half full or half empty?" So I drank the water. No more problem.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
-- Alexander H. Stephens -
This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them.
-- Alexander Nehamas -
So many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be.
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson -
...if there is a widely shared concept of intentional action... a philosophical analysis of intentional action that is wholly unconstrained by that concept runs the risk of having nothing more than a philosophical fiction as its subject matter.
-- Alfred Mele -
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
-- Anita Brookner -
A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.
-- Annie Besant -
Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects (...), but it is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising the future. The more or less constant, profound and rapid momentum of change characteristic of modern institutions, coupled with structured reflexivity, mean that on the level of everyday practice as well as philosophical [Seitenwechsel] interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted. What is acceptable/appropriate/recommended behaviour today may be seen differently tomorrow in the light of altered circumstances or incoming knowledge-claims.
-- Anthony Giddens -
I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.
-- Anton Chekhov -
Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let's have a philosophical conversation.
-- Anton Chekhov -
My activities have never had anything to do with the idea of becoming famous or achieving success. I have always been concerned with getting people to listen to me. In everything I do ... my aim is to make people listen. I want to communicate the things that I love and in which I believe, because I think that people can derive a general benefit from them. What I really want is success in a philosophical sense: I want people to grasp something of the ideas and hopes which I express in painting.
-- Antoni Tapies -
Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. 'Common sense' is the folklore of philosophy and always stands midway between folklore proper (folklore as it is normally understood) and the philosophy, science, and economics of the scientists. Common sense creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place.
-- Antonio Gramsci -
Those who deny the existence of the truth postulate the truth of their denial and plainly contradict themselves.
-- Antonio Machado -
When I break any of the chains that bind me I feel that I make myself smaller.
-- Antonio Porchia -
Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.
-- Antonio Porchia -
Science spotlights three dimensions of nature that point to God. The first is the fact that nature obeys laws. The second is the dimension of life, of intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings, which arose from matter. The third is the very existence of nature. But it is not science alone that guided me. I have also been helped by a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments.
-- Antony Flew -
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
-- Aristotle -
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
-- Aristotle -
We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
-- Aristotle -
The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
-- Aristotle -
It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
-- Aristotle -
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
-- Aristotle -
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
-- Aristotle -
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
-- Aristotle -
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
-- Aristotle -
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
-- Aristotle -
Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
-- Aristotle -
Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
-- Aristotle -
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
-- Aristotle -
It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.
-- Aristotle -
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
-- Aristotle -
The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.
-- Aristotle -
Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.
-- Aristotle -
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
-- Aristotle -
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
-- Aristotle -
We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
-- Aristotle -
No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.
-- Aristotle -
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
-- Aristotle -
Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.
-- Aristotle -
Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.
-- Aristotle -
Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.
-- Aristotle -
Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative
-- Aristotle -
Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
-- Aristotle -
A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.
-- Aristotle -
No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
-- Aristotle -
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
-- Aristotle -
The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
-- Aristotle -
The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
-- Aristotle -
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
-- Aristotle -
I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.
-- Aristotle -
The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
-- Aristotle -
In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits.
-- Arthur Danto -
Classical philosophical theism maintained the ontological distinction between God and creative world that is necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.
-- Arthur Peacocke -
We forfeit three-quarters of ourselves in order to be like other people.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
It is a clear gain to sacrifice pleasure in order to avoid pain.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Music is the melody whose text is the world.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
In action a great heart is the chief qualification. In work, a great head.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
To live alone is the fate of all great souls.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
The greatest achievements of the human mind are generally received with distrust.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
