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| "Philosophy is a study that lets us be unhappy more intelligently." Anonymous Quotes |
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| "All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy." Ernest Dimnet Quotes |
| "Man's Search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning... Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!" Victor Frankl Quotes |
| The intelligentsia ...was kept busy embroidering white stitches on the philosophical and ecclesiastical vestments of the bourgeoisie - that old and filthy fabric besmeared with the blood of toiling masses. Maxim Gorky Quotes |
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What wreath for Lamia? What for Lycius?
What for the sage, old Apollonius?
Upon her aching forehead be there hung
The leaves of willow and of adder's tongue;
And for the youth, quick, let us strip for him
The thyrsus, that his watching eyes may swim
Into forgetfulness; and, for the sage,
Let spear-grass and the spiteful thistle wage
War on his temples. Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade. John Keats Quotes |
| It does not really avail us much to get clear definitions. I am for clarity, by all means, but to think that you can reduce a concept to a relatively simple definition, and that you can somehow go somewhere that will be interesting and fruitful, just does not seem to me to be very plausible at the present time. And that is exactly what I used to strive for. I took old Socrates seriously; you search for the definition. You get the essence of the thing, and once you get the essence and the definition that somehow captures that essence, you are home free. That is how you do philosophy. When you read Hegel, you realize how incredibly flexible and supple concepts are, how they take you for a fool when you take them too literally and too tightly, how they are interconnected with one another, how they interplay in ways you really do not understand, how in other words, strangely enough, you really do not understand any part unless, or until, you understand the whole. That is what I learned from these folks. I really think that stress on context is terribly important and enriches one's philosophical approach significantly. John Lachs Quotes |
| In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show. Timothy Leary Quotes |
| Every landscape appears first of all as a vast chaos . . . . [But] the most majestic meaning of all is surely that which precedes and, commands and, to a large extent, explains The Others. . . . [My aim is] to recapture the master-meaning, which may be obscure but of which each of The Others is a partial or distorted transposition. . . . I quite naturally looked upon [Freud's theories] as the application to the human being of a method the basic pattern of which is represented by geology. . . . [Marxism, psychoanalysis and geology] demonstrate that understanding consists in reducing one type of reality to another; that the true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive. . . . But I had learned from my three sources of inspiration that the transition between one order and the other is discontinuous; that to reach reality one has first to reject experience, and then subsequently to reintegrate it into an objective synthesis devoid of any sentimentality. Claude Lévi-Strauss Quotes |
How charming is divine philosophy!
Not harsh and crabbèd, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets,
Where no crude surfeit reigns. John Milton Quotes |
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| Actual philosophers ... are commanders and law-givers: they say “thus it shall be!”, it is they who determine the Wherefore and Whither of mankind, and they possess for this task the preliminary work of all the philosophical labourers, of all those who have subdued the past—they reach for the future with creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a lawgiving, their will to truth is—will to power. Are their such philosophers today? Have there been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers? Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes |
| …[F]orms and events conjoin at their disjunctive syntheses, and all forms and all events conjoin under the single aleatory point that is Being. For example, consider white light. When shown through a prism, white light separates into red, orange, yellow, blue, green, and purple. Once past the prism, the viewer experiences these colors separately. However, if each individual color is traced back up itself, the viewer will find that they all conjoin at the prism, the disjunctive synthesis. If the viewer were to trace the color red up to the prism and find that it did not conjoin with the rest of the colors, then it would be certain that the white light shown through the prism harbored a deviation from or a perversion of pure white light. This is simply because pure white light must contain all possible frequencies and variations of color. A viewer who found this not to be true would be in the presence of a phantasmic white light, a simulacrum. William J. Peck Quotes |
| “All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions, is called a philosopher.”
Ambrose Pierce Quotes |
| The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
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| Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. George Santayana Quotes |
| Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes |
| The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Wilfred Sellars Quotes |
| "My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher." Socrates Quotes |
| "The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes." Jonathan Swift Quotes |
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| "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes |
| Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. William James Quotes |
| If a man's good for nothing else, he can at least teach philosophy. William James Quotes |
| Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?Pragmatism (1907) William James Quotes |
| My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate -- that's my philosophy. The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942 Thornton Wilder Quotes |
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| History is Philosophy teaching by examples. Thucydides Quotes |
| The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people. Mark Twain Quotes |
| There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands. Plato Quotes |
| All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.1908, notebook Mark Twain Quotes |
| The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. Henry Ward Beecher Quotes |
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| Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck. Immanuel Kant Quotes |
| I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. John Adams Quotes |
| I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure. John D. Rockefeller Quotes |
| In laying hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency, in treating the forms that had been regarded as types of fixity and perfection as originating and passing away, the Origin of Species introduced a mode of thinking that in the end was bound to transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy John Dewey Quotes |
| The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. John W. Gardner Quotes |
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| This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. HH the Dalai Lama Quotes |
| A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. George Bernard Shaw Quotes |
| Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself. H. L. Mencken Quotes |
| Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it. Cicero Quotes |
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| Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit. Freda Adler Quotes |
| Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. Ambrose Bierce Quotes |
| Philosophy is nothing but common sense in a dress suit. Author Unknown Quotes |
| Get married, in any case. If you happen to get a good mate, you will be happy; if a bad one, you will become philosophical, which is a fine thing in itself. Socrates, in Diogenes Laertius, Quotes |
| When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics. Voltaire Quotes |
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| We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy. Martin L. Gross Quotes |
| Leisure is the mother of Philosophy. Thomas Hobbes Quotes |
| Philosophy is just a hobby. You can't open a philosophy factory. Dewey Selmon Quotes |
| The natural philosophers are mostly gone. We modern scientists are adding too many decimals. Martin H. Fischer Quotes |
| God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please - you can never have both. Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes |
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| My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down. Louisa May Alcott, in Quotes |
| Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains. Alfred North Whitehead Quotes |
| If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera. John Rich Quotes |
| All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. Ambrose Bierce Quotes |
| Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see. George Berkeley Quotes |
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| To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both - a philosopher. Friedrich Nietzsche Quotes |
| And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action. And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace. Aristotle Quotes |
| Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution. Robert Zend Quotes |
| Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations. Aldous Huxley Quotes |
| Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures. Nicolas Chamfort Quotes |
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| Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. John Keats Quotes |
| If you've never met a student from the University of Chicago, I'll describe him to you. If you give him a glass of water, he says, "This is a glass of water. But is it a glass of water? And if it is a glass of water, why is it a glass of water?" And eventually he dies of thirst. Shelley Berman Quotes |
| What is the first business of philosophy? To part with self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn what he thinks that he already knows. Epictetus Quotes |
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| Philosophy is a state of fermentation, a process without final outcome. Esa Saarinen Quotes |
| To ridicule philosophy is really to philosophize. Blaise Pascal Quotes |
| We come late, if at all, to wine and philosophy: whiskey and action are easier. Mignon McLaughlin Quotes |
Philosophy will clip an angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -
Unweave a rainbow.
John Keats, "Lamia," 1819 Quotes |
| Religion is a man using a divining rod. Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel. Author Unknown Quotes |
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| I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy. Woody Allen Quotes |
| I also realized that the philosophers, far from ridding me of my vain doubts, only multiplied the doubts that tormented me and failed to remove any one of them. So I chose another guide and said, Let me follow the Inner Light; it will not lead me so far astray as others have done, or if it does it will be my own fault, and I shall not go so far wrong if I follow my own illusions as if I trusted to their deceits. Jean Jacques Rousseau Quotes |
| The only difference between Graffiti and philosophy is the word "fuck." Author Unknown Quotes |
| Learning Zen is a phenomenon of gold and dung. Before you understand it, it's like gold; after you understand it, it's like dung. Zen Saying Quotes |
| Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs. Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Quotes |
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| Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it. La Rochefoucauld Quotes |
| When I study philosophical works I feel I am swallowing something which I don't have in my mouth. Albert Einstein Quotes |
| The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. Albert Einstein Quotes |
| Anger dwells only in the bosom of fools. Albert Einstein Quotes |
| In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order. Will Durant Quotes |
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| When people ask me to compare the 20th century to older civilizations, I always say the same thing: "The situation is normal. Will Durant Quotes |
| The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages. Will Durant Quotes |
| The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers. Will Durant Quotes |
| The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds. Will Durant Quotes |
| Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them. Buckminster Fuller Quotes |
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| Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. Ambrose Bierce Quotes |
| These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matters; second, telling other people to do so. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| Whenever one finds oneself inclined to bitterness, it is a sign of emotional failure. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
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| The only difference between Graffiti and philosophy is the word "fuck. Author Unknown Quotes |
| Religion is a man using a divining rod. Philosophy is a man using a pick and shovel. Author Unknown Quotes |
| Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection. Richard Bach Quotes |
| In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea. Richard Bach Quotes |
| The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Richard Bach Quotes |
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| Why do you climb philosophical hills? Because they are worth climbing … There are no hills to go down unless you start from the top. Margaret Thatcher Quotes |
| Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another: People are friends in spots. George Santayana Quotes |
| There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books. George Santayana Quotes |
| The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes. Jonathan Swift Quotes |
| There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning. Christopher Morley Quotes |
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| When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue-you sell him a whole new life. Christopher Morley Quotes |
| The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease. Marianne Moore Quotes |
| You have freedom when you're easy in your harness. Robert Frost Quotes |
| A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity. Robert Frost Quotes |
| Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They're just braver five minutes longer. Ronald Reagan Quotes |
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| The true joy of life [is] being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one … being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap heap … being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances. George Bernard Shaw Quotes |
| As only New Yorkers know, if you can get through the twilight, you'll live through the night. Dorothy Parker Quotes |
| Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. Aldous Huxley Quotes |
| Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it. Tom Stoppard Quotes |
| The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. Tom Stoppard Quotes |
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| Old age is a shipwreck. Charles De Gaulle Quotes |
| I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| To achieve, you need thought…. You have to know what you are doing and that's real power. Ayn Rand Quotes |
| Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye. Helen Keller Quotes |
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| Death … is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see. Helen Keller Quotes |
| If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: "It seemed a good idea at the time. Rebecca West Quotes |
| A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere. Rebecca West Quotes |
| Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul. Rebecca West Quotes |
| It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion. Rebecca West Quotes |
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| All of us who grew up before the war are immigrants in time, immigrants from an earlier world, living in an age essentially different from anything we knew before. The young are at home here. Their eyes have always seen satellites in the sky. They have never known a world in which war did not mean annihilation. Margaret Mead Quotes |
| As long as any adult thinks that he, like the parents and teachers of old, can become introspective, invoking his own youth to understand the youth before him, he is lost. Margaret Mead Quotes |
| To cherish the life of the world. Margaret Mead Quotes |
| Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. George Orwell Quotes |
| There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Albert Camus Quotes |
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| At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures-be what he is. And, above all, accept these things. Albert Camus Quotes |
| I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities. Bertrand Russell Quotes |
| There's a difference between a philosophy and a Bumper Sticker. Charles M. Schulz Quotes |
| There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. Cicero Quotes |
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| I went off to college planning to major in math or philosophy-- of course, both those ideas are really the same idea. Frank Wilczek Quotes |
| Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes |
| One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another. Rene Descartes Quotes |
| Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong. Richard Feynman Quotes |
| All philosophies, if you ride them, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others. Samuel Butler Quotes |
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| True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is. Victor Cousin Quotes |
| There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers. William James Quotes |
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. William Shakespeare Quotes |
| Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and erasers...and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn't even ask for erasers. Isaac Asimov Quotes |
| Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself. Henry Mencken Quotes |
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| The only secure knowledge is that I exist. Rene Descartes Quotes |
| Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. Author Unknown Quotes |
| Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex. Karl Marx Quotes |
| What do you know and how do you know it? Ayn Rand Quotes |
| There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. Albert Camus Quotes |
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| No sooner do we depart from sense and instinct to follow reason but we are insensibly drawn into uncouth paradoxes, difficulties, and inconsistencies, which multiply and grow upon us as we advance in speculation; till at length, having wandered through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn scepticism. George Berkeley Quotes |
| Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed. Blaise Pascal Quotes |
| I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed. Bruce Lee Quotes |
| To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts; but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates. Henry Thoreau Quotes |
| There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes |
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| In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names. Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes |
| My advice to you is to get married. If you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not you'll become a philosopher. Socrates Quotes |
| An unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates Quotes |
| Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein Quotes |
| We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities. Thomas Paine Quotes |
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| Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities. Aristotle Quotes |
| I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law. Aristotle Quotes |
| My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all. Stephen Hawking Quotes |
| You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. C.S. Lewis Quotes |
| Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation. C.S. Lewis Quotes |
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| Never judge a philosophy by its abuse. Saint Augustine Quotes |
| All men desire to know. Aristotle Quotes |
| If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. C.S. Lewis Quotes |
| Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the Universe - which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. Galileo Galilei Quotes |
| All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher. Ambrose Bierce Quotes |
