Top 36 Great Philosophical Quotes
#1. It can be shown that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any universe containing several objects. The fact that our universe lends itself to mathematical treatment is not a fact of any great philosophical significance.
Bertrand Russell
#2. Every noble action is selfish. Some selfish actions are nobler than others. But they are all selfish. And as such there can be no action purely noble anyway. Even the nobility in God's great philosophical intentions is bounded by his vanity.
Kedar Joshi
#3. Jacques Tati is the great philosophical tinkerer of comedy, taking meticulous care to arrange his films so that they unfold in a series of revelations and effortless delights.
Roger Ebert
#4. Betemit's positional flexibility is the same as yours: He can stand around and muse about the great philosophical debates of our day anywhere on the field. Catching and throwing the baseball is an entirely different question.
Baseball Prospectus
#5. When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,
those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.
Henry David Thoreau
#6. Science tells us what we can know, but what we can know is little, and if we forget how much we cannot know, we become insensitive to many things of great importance.
Bertrand Russell
#7. By tracing the careers of the four members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, Laura Snyder has found a wonderful way not just to tell the great stories of 19th-century science, but to bring them vividly to life.
Tom Standage
#8. The past is past, and the future is yet to come. That means the future is in your hands - the future entirely depends on the present. That realization gives you a great responsibility.
Dalai Lama
#9. As a teacher, it's a great help to be teaching philosophical systems you don't believe. You can actually do a better job of presenting them if you leave your beliefs at the door.
William H Gass
#10. He who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.
Confucius
#11. Like Flannery O'Connor, McCorkle's genius is to give us both philosophical speculation and a riveting narrative filled with unforgettable characters. Great writing, poignancy, humor, wisdom-all are in abundance here. Jill McCorkle is one of the South's greatest writers; she is also one of America's.
Ron Rash
#12. The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.
Simone Weil
#13. The great novelists are philosophical novelists
that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
Albert Camus
#14. I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Soren Kierkegaard
#15. Newton, Pascal, Bossuet, Racine, F?nelon
that is to say, some of the most enlightened men on earth, in the most philosophical of all ages
have been believers in Jesus Christ; and the great Cond?, when dying, repeated these noble words, "Yes, I shall see God as He is, face to face!".
Luc De Clapiers
#16. A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.
William Shakespeare
#17. It is the privilege of true genius, And especially genius who opens up a new path, To make great mistakes with impunity
Lewis Carroll
#18. Frank Schirrmacher's passing is a great loss. Among the intellectuals, he, along with Friedrich Kittler, was the only one who understood the philosophical dimensions of the Internet.
Hubert Burda
#19. To put up with what you cannot avoid is a philosophical principle, that may not perhaps lead you to the accomplishment of great deeds, but is assuredly eminently practical.
Jules Verne
#20. When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out ...
Eugene Ionesco
#21. Such is the great nature of man, it resides the true face beneath a glittering masquerade.
K. Hari Kumar
#22. America is truly special because it's founded on an idea. It's the ideological and philosophical equivalent of a formless God, in other words, you know? It's, again, the only great country in the world that it is formed out of words.
Simon Schama
#23. Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground.
Michel De Montaigne
#24. We can bear with great philosophy the sufferings of others, especially if we do not actually see them.
Albion Fellows Bacon
#27. The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.
Noam Chomsky
#28. Every great man exhibits the talent of organization or construction, whether it be in a poem, a philosophical system, a policy, or a strategy. And without method there is no organization nor construction.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#29. Living in the fast lane is great as long as you remember where the slip roads are
Benny Bellamacina
#30. One needs to properly possess only a couple of great thoughts
they shed light on many stretches whose illumination one would never have believed in.
Georg Simmel
#31. I can't pretend that I'm a great student of the art of comedy because anybody that becomes philosophical about humour doesn't know what he's talking about.
Jackie Mason
#32. Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Euripides
#33. Small men command the letter of the law. Great men serve its spirit. For the spirit of the law is justice ... and justice is the spirit of God.
J.C. Marino
#34. I still take great pleasure in playing around with philosophical questions, the ones that [Bertrand] Russell is the first to admit have no unequivocal answers. . . . I guess this quality makes me a Cerebral Hedonist, although some would say it makes me a mental masochist.
Daniel Klein
#35. Our society is the product of several great religious and philosophical traditions. The ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Christianity, Judaism, humanism and the Enlightenment have made us who we are.
Jan Peter Balkenende
#36. Our music has depth, and attempts philosophical thought and meaning with discussions of infinity, eternity and mortality. There is a line which people cross that turns it into some magical, mystical realm, for which I dont claim responsibility and dont hold any great truck with.
David Gilmour
