Top 100 Quotes About Philosophers
#1. Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.
Patricia Churchland
#2. When it comes to science, philosophers stand still.
Sam Houssami
#3. And tell him it's quite true that the best of the philosophers are of no use to their fellows; but that he should blame, not the philosophers, but those who fail to make use of them.
Plato
#4. Philosophers have done wisely when they have told us to cultivate our reason rather than our feelings, for reason reconciles us to the daily things of existence; our feelings teach us to yearn after the far, the difficult, the unseen.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#5. The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.
Susan B. Anthony
#6. Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.
Samuel Johnson
#7. It has always surprised me how little attention philosophers have paid to humor, since it is a more significant process of mind than reason. Reason can only sort out perceptions, but the humor process is involved in changing them.
Edward De Bono
#8. All our contemporary philosophers perhaps without knowing it are looking through eyeglasses that Baruch Spinoza polished. Spinoza was a philosopher who earned his livelihood by grinding lenses.
Heinrich Heine
#9. Your talk's so clever it makes my head spin,' Milva snorted. 'And all your wisdom comes down to what's under a woman's skirt. Woeful philosophers.
Andrzej Sapkowski
#10. The soul is a fire that darts its rays through all the senses; it is in this fire that existence consists; all the observations and all the efforts of philosophers ought to turn towards this Me, the centre and moving power of our sentiments and our ideas.
Madame De Stael
#11. A State would be happy where philosophers were kings, or kings philosophers.
Plato
#12. I feel friendship towards philosophers, but towards sophists, teachers of literature, or any other such kind of godforsaken people, I neither feel friendship now, nor may I ever do so in the future.
Apollonius Of Tyana
#13. Broadly put, philosophers think: politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.
Jon Meacham
#14. Philosophers have often held dispute
As to the seat of thought in man and brute
For that the power of thought attends the latter
My friend, thy beau, hath made a settled matter,
And spite of dogmas current in all ages,
One settled fact is better than ten sages. (O,Tempora! O,Mores!)
Edgar Allan Poe
#15. Philosophers are divided on the question of whether the narrative therein unfolded [the Crossman Diaries] is grippingly boring or boringly gripping.
Clive James
#16. The centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures.
Robert Bellarmine
#17. For in this Case, we are not to give Credit to the Many, who say, that none ought to be educated but the Free; but rather to the Philosophers, who say, that the Well-educated alone are free.
Epictetus
#18. Shouldn't I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn't I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not.
Kevin Warwick
#19. For example, the philosophers who were interested in logic were probably rather logical for mathematicians. But the ASL got us together, so we could talk to each other and publish in the same journal.
Stephen Cole Kleene
#20. The love of truth, virtue, and the happiness of mankind are specious pretexts, but not the inward principles that set divines at work; else why should they affect to abuse human reason, to disparage natural religion, to traduce the philosophers as they universally do?
George Berkeley
#21. Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they
wish to seem unusually pious.
Baruch Spinoza
#22. Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort?
Patricia Churchland
#23. It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.
Morris Raphael Cohen
#24. Identifying Israel with Jewry obscures the existence of the small but important post-Zionist movement in Israel, including the philosophers Adi Ophir and Anat Biletzki, the sociologist Uri Ram, the professor of theatre Avraham Oz and the poet Yitzhak Laor.
Judith Butler
#25. The poets and artists and philosophers, resistance activists, secret scouts and troublemakers, had become, as they must, soldiers. Now,
China Mieville
#26. The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
#27. Philosophers console themselves with explanations.
Marty Rubin
#28. Philosophers are people who talk about something they don't understand and make you think it's your fault!1
Charles R. Swindoll
#29. It will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system.
Charles Sanders Peirce
#30. To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.
Isaac Asimov
#31. The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.
Emil Cioran
#32. As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it.
Simone De Beauvoir
#33. I, for one, struggle a little bit with a $250,000 education for a philosophy degree. They are a wonderful people, but we can't employ philosophers in manufacturing in the United States. We need a one- or two-year technical add-on for a high school.
Douglas R. Oberhelman
#34. One can defend common sense against the attacks of philosophers only by solving their puzzles, i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack common sense ...
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#35. The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.
Julius Evola
#36. We need fewer philosophies and more philosophers.
Frank Pierson
#37. St. Paul would say to the philosophers that God created man so that he would seek the Divine, try to attain the Divine. That is why all pre-Christian philosophy is theological at its summit.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#38. What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Philosophers have pondered that question for centuries. I'm afraid the answer is disappointingly simple: Mating. That's it.
Oliver Markus
#39. There are many things wealth cannot buy, and most of those are enumerated by philosophers who have never woken wondering if this day would be their last.
Jacqueline Carey
#40. What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing of the origin and destiny of cats?
Henry David Thoreau
#41. Human beings were not, as the eighteenth-century philosophers supposed, wise and virtuous: they were apes.
Aldous Huxley
#42. Men who are lovers of wisdom [i.e., philosophers] must be inquirers into many things.
Heraclitus
#43. The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall
Cormac McCarthy
#44. Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
#45. Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.
Fernando Pessoa
#46. What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.
Leonor Varela
#47. Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.
Jonathan Haidt
#48. I largely defer to the cognitive ethologists. I believe that the arguments that they make on this score are extremely persuasive. More than this, I do think as well that a priori objections by philosophers to successful research programs in the sciences have a very bad track record.
Hilary Kornblith
#49. Science has so far been unable to tell us how self-aware dogs are, much less whether they have anything like our conscious thoughts. This is not surprising, since neither scientists nor philosophers can agree about what the consciousness of humans consists of, let alone that of animals.
John Bradshaw
#50. Hope was other people, no matter what the philosophers said. And this was a time that needed hope.
Tiffany Reisz
#51. Socrates ... is the first philosopher of life [Lebensphilosoph], ... Thinking serves life, while among all previous philosophers life had served thought and knowledge ... Thus Socratic philosophy is absolutely practical: it is hostile to all knowledge unconnected to ethical implications.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#52. Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece
and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).
Alasdair MacIntyre
#53. The conception of Godhead formed by some devout philosophers and mystics has quite rightly been so immeasurably vast, though still assuredly utterly inadequate and necessarily beneath reality, that the notion of a God revealed in human formborn, sufferin.
Oliver Lodge
#54. Novelists don't age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.
Martin Amis
#55. You say some Greek philosophers could dazzle their audiences
with their riddles? That does not interest me at all. Bring
more wine instead and play your lute; your changes in tones
remind me of the wind that rushes past and disappears,
just like us.
Omar Khayyam
#56. Their [philosophers] thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a re-recognizing, a remembering, a return and a home-coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew: philosophizing is so far a kind of atavism of the highest order.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#57. When the mind opens by speaking denials, this true Self that philosophers have so long striven to free shows itself all glorious with wisdom, strength, and holiness ... Denial of evil is a word of Truth.
Myrtle Fillmore
#58. These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a specific example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted.
Alfred Korzybski
#59. Summertime, and the reading is easy ... Well, maybe not easy, exactly, but July and August are hardly the months to start working your way through the works of Germanic philosophers. Save Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl for the bleaker days of February.
Michael Dirda
#60. Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?
Henri Bergson
#61. What a mathematical proof actually does is show that certain conclusions, such as the irrationality of , follow from certain premises, such as the principle of mathematical induction. The validity of these premises is an entirely independent matter which can safely be left to philosophers.
Timothy Gowers
#63. The fact is that all the important political philosophers and scientists from the great Aristotle on, with the exception of those of the French Enlightenment and Mill, have sided with the powers that be.
Mario Bunge
#64. If true happiness depended on the thoughts of man, then all philosophers and deep thinkers would be filled to overflowing with it.
Sadhu Sundar Singh
#65. In fact, of course, I hold that propositions that contemporary
philosophers would properly count as 'empirical' can be necessary and be known to be such.
Saul Kripke
#66. In our corrupted state, common weaknesses and defects contribute more towards the reconciling us to one another than all the precepts of the philosophers and divines.
E. F. L. Wood, 1st Earl Of Halifax
#67. Perhaps one should expect to be attended to by philosophers in Edinburgh delicatessens, just as one might be waited upon by psychoanalysts in the restaurants of Buenos Aires. Is the braised beef really what you want?
Alexander McCall Smith
#68. My world view is somewhat unique. I have learned from many great philosophers including Plato, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Darwin, Tagore, Emerson, and many more.
Debasish Mridha
#69. Philosophers often appear to intend to want to get answers about humans that we can't get about insects, and that's too much, yaknow?
Noam Chomsky
#70. The brainless rushing about makes us feel time starved, which, he writes "does not result in death, but rather, as ancient Athenian philosophers observed, in never beginning to live."6
Brigid Schulte
#71. Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers will always be children. So you're right, it's a child's question, just as it should be.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#72. It isn't at all difficult for philosophy to begin. Far from it: it begins with nothing and can accordingly always begin. What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.
Soren Kierkegaard
#73. Scholars have long known that fishing eventually turns men into philosophers. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy decent tackle on a philosopher's salary.
Patrick F. McManus
#74. Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.
Charles Caleb Colton
#75. Hegel's philosophy is very difficult - he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers. Before entering on any detail, a general characterization may prove helpful.
Bertrand Russell
#76. Before Socrates, philosophers were primarily interested in explaining the world around them and the phenomena of that world - in doing what we would now call science. Although Socrates studied science as a young man, he abandoned it to focus his attention on the human condition.
William B. Irvine
#77. The nature of God is something that is of serious interest to believers, to theologians, and to philosophers. And yet we can't come to the nature of God, unless we also have some knowledge of the nature of the universe as having come from God.
George Coyne
#79. Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
Rebecca Goldstein
#80. The Law of the Twelve Tables, a Roman legislation circa 450 BC, actually required a father to put to death any deformed child (Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto). (Modern moral philosophers, like Joseph Fletcher and Princeton University's Peter Singer, advocate the same thing.)
Robert J. Hutchinson
#81. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.
Randal Marlin
#82. Although according to certain philosophers it is quite difficult to distinguish the jester from the melancholic, life itself being a comic drama or a dramatic comedy.
Comte De Lautreamont
#83. Very few of us can now place ourselves in the mental condition in which even such philosophers as the great Descartes were involved in the days before Newton had announced the true laws of the motion of bodies.
James Clerk Maxwell
#84. This concept that you refer to in Buddhism is something I've been nurtured with through the history of my country for 700, 800 years - Persian poets and philosophers haven't said anything different with regard to experiencing life in the moment, as opposed to the belief of permanence.
Abbas Kiarostami
#85. Pagan philosophers set up reason as the sole guide of life, of wisdom and conduct; but Christian philosophy demands of us that we surrender our reason to the Holy Spirit; and this means that we no longer live for ourselves, but that Christ lives and reigns within us (Rom 12:1; Eph 4:23; Gal 2:20).
John Calvin
#86. Many men talk like philosophers and live like fools.
Philip K. Dick
#87. Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.
Demetri Martin
#88. To this principle of vanity, which philosophers call a mean one, and which I do not, I owe a great part of the figure which I have made in life.
Lord Chesterfield
#89. Enough of self, that darling luscious theme,
O'er which philosophers in raptures dream;
Of which with seeming disregard they write
Then prizing most when most they seem to slight.
Charles Churchill
#90. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys.
T. S. Eliot
#91. Repeating the commonplaces about atheism and materialism and sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when there is nothing else to be said of them.
Plato
#92. [Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives.
Seneca.
#93. The tendency of philosophers who know nothing of machinery is to talk of man as a mere mechanism, intending by this to imply that he is without purpose. This shows a lack of understanding of machines as well as of man.
Arthur Young
#94. Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.
Samuel Beckett
#95. 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
#96. One of the things that you see ancient philosophers and contemporary scientists agree on is that strong relationships are a key to happiness, maybe the key to happiness. People who have more strong relationships in their lives just feel happier.
Gretchen Rubin
#97. The world is in trouble because of a few funny sympathetic philosophers
M.F. Moonzajer
#98. The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers.
Bryan Magee
#99. It's an already inside outside,
The philosophers say it's the soul
But it's not the soul: it's the animal or the man itself
In its way of existing.
Alberto Caeiro
#100. Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.
C.S. Lewis
