Top 75 Modern Philosophy Quotes
#1. He philosophy of Islam will be shown in terms of the modern philosophy, and if there are imperfections in the old ideas then they shall be removed. My task is merely constructive, and in this construction I shall take into consideration the best traditions of Islamic philosophy.
Muhammad Iqbal
#2. Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship.
Margaret Atwood
#3. The stability of modern governments above the ancient, and the accuracy of modern philosophy, have improved, and probably will still improve, by similar gradations.
David Hume
#4. Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.
Pierre Hadot
#5. Modern philosophy certainly exacts a surrender of all supernaturalism and fixed dogma and rigid institutionalism with which Christianity has been historically associated
John Dewey
#6. Wrangling about precisely what constitutes genuine philosophy, proper philosophical practice, method, and aims is an important part of modern philosophy's content and heritage
Gregory B. Sadler
#7. How significant is Aristotle? Well, I wouldn't want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought.
Edward Feser
#8. If we return to the roots of planning we see at its heart a desire to understand human behaviour and provide a robust model for influencing it. Rather than dismantling strategy into endless experimentation, we need a new way of understanding the world, a modern philosophy.
Faris Yakob
#9. Descartes is rightly regarded as the father of modern philosophy primarily and generally because he helped the faculty of reason to stand on its own feet by teaching men to use their brains
in place whereof the Bible, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other, had previously served.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#10. The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#11. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.
Charles E. Curran
#12. We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.
Joseph De Maistre
#13. In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.
Jacques Maritain
#14. Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.
Werner Heisenberg
#15. It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
George Orwell
#16. I have nothing to fear from serious social studies of science, and I hope that my philosophy will help progressive science policies while showing that the most modern views of science are ignorant and regressive, even if they are accompanied by a leftist-sounding rhetoric.
Mario Bunge
#17. The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#18. In this complex modern world, it is impossible to be simple.
Debasish Mridha
#19. City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.
Leon Trotsky
#20. Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.
Simon Critchley
#21. If the attitude of many non-Catholic modern philosophers toward Catholic thought could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be: It has been tried, it has produced its definitive results, which have been found lacking, and now its time is past
Gregory B. Sadler
#22. The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags.
James Buchan
#23. A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.
Leszek Kolakowski
#24. Philosophy, as the modern world knows it, is only intellectual club-swinging.
H.L. Mencken
#25. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
Karl Marx
#26. When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
Dallas Willard
#27. Behind the epistemological scholasticism of empirio-criticism one must not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society.
Vladimir Lenin
#28. We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.
Erich Fromm
#29. Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy.
Auguste Comte
#30. Posterity will one day laugh at the sublime foolishness of the modern materialistic philosophy. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
Louis Pasteur
#31. The whole philosophy of modern times is to dissolve distinctions between individuals and deal with them as large collections of people. It's essentially self-interested on the part of authority.
Tom Stoppard
#32. It is a tragedy of modern life that the light of truth scares the society much more than the darkness of ignorance.
Abhijit Naskar
#33. Like the priestly cult of the Middle Ages, the modern priestly cult of "scientific" psychotherapists exist overwhelmingly to stultify or blunt a too-acute insight into the powers benumbed in our personalities by our prevailing culture.
Kenny Smith
#34. Sometime we forget to value the small things, that inspire us more than the large! We should learn from daily than planning stupid future.
Vikram Roy
#35. The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#36. Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.
Matthew Stewart
#37. probably the best-known tenet of modern moral philosophy: the doctrine that there is an unbridgeable gulf between facts and values, between descriptions of what is and prescriptions of what ought to be.
Peter Singer
#38. The difference between the modern laws and those of the past is that wisdom is no longer a respected requirement and it has become secondary in importance to bureaucratic procedure.
Gwendolyn Taunton
#39. Modern man lives increasingly in the future and neglects the present.
Loren Eiseley
#40. In place of philosophy, which involves developing a system of belief based on questioning and reasoning, many of our modern leaders have embraced ideology, which is based on having a system of beliefs essentially stripped of the questions.
David Rothkopf
#41. Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attibutable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Bertrand Russell
#42. PYRRHONISM- An ancient philosophy, named for its inventor. It consisted of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern professors have added that.
Ambrose Bierce
#43. Modern sociology is virtually an attempt to take up the larger program of social analysis and interpretation which was implicit in Adam Smith's moral philosophy, but which was suppressed for a century by prevailing interest in the technique of the production of wealth.
Albion W. Small
#44. The message of guidance that neither politics nor philosophy nor religion now seems able to provide, we look for in modern literature.
Irving Howe
#45. In every ancient religious and sacred text, faith is a verb; a thing to be demonstrated. It is in modern days that we have diluted faith from an act to a philosophy.
Steve Maraboli
#46. This is the Modern Man, who cannot save himself but wants to save the world.
He is the Wise who knows not.
And his footsteps on the road click tic-tac, tic-tac
Cristiane Serruya
#47. Passion is the most glamorous outfit not the most modern fashion.
Debasish Mridha
#48. The pretended physical philosophy of modern days strips Man of all his moral attributes, or holds them of no account in the estimate of his origin and place in the created world.
Adam Sedgwick
#49. . . . the abandonment of metaphysics involves more than the redefinition of the nature of rational inquiry in accordance with the tenets of modern scientific methodology; this redefinition itself makes matters of value and validity mere matters of opinion.
Alan White
#50. French existentialism is an unhelpful philosophy in which to couch modern feminism: born from the ravages of the Second World War, it is a cynical, individualistic school of thought that posits the self and personal choice as the measure of life's entire meaning.
Naomi Wolf
#51. The development of physics in the twentieth century already has transformed the consciousness of those involved with it. The study (of modern physics) produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of eastern philosophy.
Gary Zukav
#52. Sex education in the modern manner has been well-described as plumbing for hedonists.
George F. Will
#53. Money is an important tool for modern life. Money will not make you happy, but you can use money wisely to enhance your happiness.
Debasish Mridha
#54. There are so many simple things getting unnoticed in me, it makes me feel I am a robot!
Vikram Roy
#55. In this modern world it is easy to be complex but difficult to be simple. At least try to keep your mind simple.
Debasish Mridha
#56. The distinction between nature and convention is fundamental for classical political philosophy and even for most of modern political philosophy, as can be seen most simply from the distinction between natural right and positive right.
Leo Strauss
#57. Rich in material, but Devoid of Knowledge is like having an antique Clock with no numbers. Appealing to the eye, but Useless in the modern world.
Andrea L'Artiste
#58. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in color. The life of the senses was
described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the
morbid confessions of a modern sinner.
Charlotte Bronte
#59. The Sermon on the Mount seems dangerous. It challenges the whole underlying conception on which modern society is built. It would replace it by a new conception, animate it with a new motive, and turn it toward a new goal.
E. Stanley Jones
#60. Most of the modern human society has nearly lost the faculty of observing the internal mechanism.
Abhijit Naskar
#61. This is the Modern Man. The man who seeks himself without ever seeking, because he does not want to find;
The man who does not hesitate to criticize the other, although he behaves in the same way;
Cristiane Serruya
#62. How rich are we that we can look on these worlds with the perspective of modern science ... that we do not have to wonder as did former men whether stars are jewels hanging from celestial drapery or peepholes in the astral skin of creation!
Guy Murchie
#63. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed a bridge: on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious.
Carl Jung
#64. All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#65. What decent philosopher was ever an appeaser? The former is a rare catch among the multitudes of modern opinionists. His role is to be one who loves truth. That is a place where his love for humanity is more powerful than his love for hot air about empowering humanity.
Criss Jami
#66. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
Guy Debord
#67. The problem of restoring integration and co-operation between man's beliefs about the world in which he lives and his beliefs about values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from life.
John Dewey
#69. 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
#70. Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.
Alexander McCall Smith
#71. The literature of the immediate future will inevitably turn away from painting, whether respectably realistic or modern, and from daily life, whether old or the very latest and revolutionary, and turn to artistically realized philosophy.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#72. -make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being ...
Aldous Huxley
#73. Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Ambrose Bierce
#74. The negative attitudes toward the genres - romance, science-fiction, westerns, suspense, etc. - are fallout from the academic world's long-standing fascination with existential philosophy and modern theories of psychology and sociology.
Jayne Ann Krentz
#75. The modern public school derived from a philosophy of freedom reflected in the First Amendment ... The non-sectarian or secular public school was the means of reconciling freedom in general with religious freedom.
William J. Brennan
