Top 100 History Of Philosophy Quotes
#1. The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
Bryan Magee
#2. As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Karl Jaspers
#3. Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death.
Jostein Gaarder
#4. There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter if not a paragraph or a name in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#5. O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy ... In finishing it I found ... such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
William James
#6. The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
Karl Jaspers
#7. Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
Tadao Ando
#8. In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.
Italo Calvino
#9. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
Hilary Kornblith
#10. The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man's being, unfolding itself in thought.
Karl Jaspers
#11. The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments.
William James
#13. I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.
Peter Ackroyd
#14. There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter
if not a paragraph or proper noun
in the history of philosophy.
Jorge Luis Borges
#15. If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.
Terry Eagleton
#16. Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.
Margaret Thatcher
#17. The United States is the result of an enlightened philosophy; China is the outcome of traditions and history.
Patrick Mendis
#19. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#20. I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.
William Shakespeare
#21. With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
#22. Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume
an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.
John Dewey
#24. Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.
Adam Nevill
#25. Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.
Robert Anton Wilson
#26. In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.
Will Durant
#27. Philosophy alone can boast (and perhaps it is no more than the boast of philosophy), that her gentle hand is able to eradicate from the human mind the latent and deadly principle of fanaticism.
Edward Gibbon
#28. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?
Henry David Thoreau
#29. The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.
George Henry Lewes
#30. I'm a geophysicist who has conducted and published climate studies in top-rank scientific journals. My perspective on Mr. Inhofe and the issue of global warming is informed not only by my knowledge of climate science but also by my studies of the history and philosophy of science.
David Deming
#31. Jean-Pierre Marquis, From a Geometrical Point of View: A Study of the History and Philosophy of Category Theory, Springer Science & Business Media, 2008.
Roger Scruton
#32. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.
Victor Hugo
#33. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#34. I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A.E. Housman
#35. Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.
Will Durant
#36. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This s the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.
John Gray
#37. Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
#39. Putting together philosophy and children would have been difficult for most of history. But very fortunately for me, when I started graduate school there was a real scientific revolution taking place in developmental psychology.
Alison Gopnik
#40. As far back as history records people thinking, thinking people
have been befuddled by the mysteries of life and existence.
Lewis N. Roe
#41. Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.
Jean Piaget
#42. If you look at history you'll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.
Desiderius Erasmus
#43. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
#44. Hegel believed that the basis of human cognition changed from one generation to the next. There were therefore no 'eternal truths', no timeless reason. The only fixed point philosophy can hold on to is history itself.
Jostein Gaarder
#45. The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.
Plato
#46. Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
Auguste Rodin
#48. He immersed himself in anthropology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, accumulating hundreds of credit hours without collecting a degree. He saw no reason to. The pursuit of knowledge, he maintained, was a worthy objective in its own right and needed no external validation.
Jon Krakauer
#50. [The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
Edward Gibbon
#51. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#52. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.
Lorenzo Ghiberti
#53. For the miserable find comfort in the philosophy that not on them alone has evil fallen.
Procopius
#54. Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.
Charles Kettering
#55. One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.
Will Durant
#56. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
#57. Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.
Abhijit Naskar
#58. By philosophy, history, economics and science, all knowledge and wisdom, humanity may eventually arrive at the awareness of its own oneness.... Sudipta Das
Sudipta Das
#59. Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
Imre Lakatos
#60. Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#62. The "self-actualization" philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will.
David Graeber
#63. The feminine section of the proletarian army is of particularly great significance... the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women take part in it.
Vladimir Lenin
#65. Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
Andre Suares
#67. The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.
Imre Lakatos
#68. Life on Earth is not the result of a series of miracles performed by a supernatural god-creator, and it is definitely not a product of matter having a mind of its own, of an equally miraculous evolutionary process supervised by Lady Natural Selection who would turn rabbits into lions.
Paul Greene
#69. (on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
Bertrand Russell
#70. Examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name "philosophy" indicates that "philosophy" has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.
Gregory B. Sadler
#71. Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Carl Sagan
#72. Everything returns and renews itself. The difference now is that the rate of these returns has increased, in both space and time, in an unheard-of fashion. Now my thoughts can circle the globe in minutes. Entire passages of world history are played out in a couple of years.
Frigyes Karinthy
#75. And now it seems she's on my wavelength. That's all I need. My mind isn't much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private.
Russell Hoban
#76. My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.
F. Sionil Jose
#77. Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers' cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#78. Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
#79. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#80. He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem "spoke to him" it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.
Claire Messud
#81. That everything in nature has "the appearance" of design is not exactly evidence against design. According to Dawkins, though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it is almost certainly something else.
Paul Greene
#82. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#83. The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound ... Throughout history ... there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.
Corliss Lamont
#84. Those unuttered words of your smile can rewrite the history of this wonderful world.
Debasish Mridha
#85. The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.
Frederic Bastiat
#86. Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#87. Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.
Jules Michelet
#88. A philosophy of the history of the human race, worthy of its name, must begin with the heavens and descend to the earth, must be charged with the conviction that all existence is one-a single conception sustained from beginning to end upon one identical law.
Friedrich Ratzel
#89. Our history, especially that of the great religions, Christianity in particular, has given us a "hidden prejudice" in favor of the "beyond" at the expense of the "here and now" and this must be changed.
(quoted from The Age of Atheists" by Peter Watson, p 25)
Luc Ferry
#91. Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[ ... ] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?
Daniel Quinn
#92. If there are more than two sexes, then so be it and, of course, the assumption that there are two helps shape, as many have argued, the binary logic that underpins much of the history of western philosophy.
Alison Assiter
#93. Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.
Tess Gerritsen
#94. The first duty of a man is to think for himself
Jose Marti
#95. There's nothing new about anti-work philosophy. History is dotted with individuals and groups who decided that laziness was next to godliness and work was a waste of time.
Tom Hodgkinson
#96. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.
Teju Cole
#97. Oracle of Delphi:
In my deep mystery I breathe
your fragrance swirling in
your odourless soul
I return your mystery
revealing your destiny deep in
the seed of your God Self
Ramon Ravenswood
#98. I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.
Zbigniew Herbert
#99. For so-called conscious rappers, it is an opportunity to rap about ways to educate others about African American history, politics and even relationships: all of which would be missed if society merely focused on the "hook" and ignored the influence.
Carlos Wallace
#100. There is machinery in the mind that is consciousness. Knowing the machine is the dawn of a new era.
Allan Wesler
