Top 100 Quotes About Philosophic
#1. History describes what has happened, poetry what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.
Aristotle.
#2. He fought because it was considered the 'thing to do,' because he liked the people he had to live with, and because those people wouldn't have a good opinion of him if he didn't fight. People never needed much of a philosophic motive to make them do the socially approved things.
Walter M. Miller Jr.
#3. What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?
Clifford D. Simak
#4. It takes an unusually philosophic mind to accept that all one's suffering might be to no end, really, in the larger scheme of things.
Ian C. Esslemont
#5. If a philosophic theory is once ruled out of court, no one can tell when it will appear again.
Morris Raphael Cohen
#6. I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. Humanism ... is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.
William James
#8. In life and art we need to make sure that we honour that which our hearts and brains tell us is good. And we should cast a philosophic yet curious smile at that which our hearts and brains tell us otherwise.
Robert Genn
#9. The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.
Alfred North Whitehead
#10. To reflect the entire spectrum, the dynamics of the adventure novel must be invested with a philosophic synthesis of one kind or another.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#11. Science, like art, religion, political theory, or psychoanalysis - is work that holds out the promise of philosophic understanding, excites in us the belief that we can 'make sense of it all.
Vivian Gornick
#12. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. I don't think literature will be purged until its philosophic pretentiousness is extruded, and I shant live to see that purge, nor perhaps when it has happened will anything survive.
E. M. Forster
#14. When philosophic reason is clear and certain by intuition or necessary induction, no subsequent revelation supported by prophecies or miracles can supersede it.
John Adams
#15. The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.
Michael Polanyi
#16. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class have: but he has also, what they have not.
this strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#17. As far as I am concerned, philosophic questioning is just as likely to make you confused and depressed as it is to improve your condition.
Christopher Paolini
#18. The philosophic goal in China was a search for harmony and perfection, not the discovery of truth by reasoning. In China's Confucian society, the best pathway to perfection was the development of a virtuous life.
Patrick Mendis
#19. The Germans are the most philosophic people in the world, and the greatest smokers: now I trace their philosophy to their smoking. Smoking has a sedative effect upon the nerves, and enables a man to bear the sorrows of this life (of which every one has his share) not only decently, but dignifiedly.
George Henry Borrow
#20. Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.
Raya Dunayevskaya
#21. I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.
William James
#22. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
William James
#23. Philosophic meditation is an accomplishment by which I attain Being and my own self, not impartial thinking which studies a subject with indifference.
Karl Jaspers
#24. An attitude of philosophic doubt, of suspended judgment, is repugnant to the natural man. Belief is an independent joy to him.
William Minto
#25. The third principle is that any philosophic knowledge is only valuable if it is true or if it works.
L. Ron Hubbard
#26. I think that one should view with philosophic admiration the strange paths of the libido and should investigate the purposes of its circuitous ways.
Carl Jung
#27. Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
Hannah Arendt
#28. Consequently, the first thing to be done in any search after philosophic principles is to travel over the special sciences with a view to extracting from them such information as is relevant to our purpose.
Hugh Elliot
#29. The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion.
Emil Cioran
#30. I am convinced that when Nietzsche came to Switzerland and went insane, it was not because of venereal disease, though he did have this disease. Rather, it was because he understood that insanity was the only philosophic answer if the infinite-personal God does not exist.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#31. Philosophic argument, especially that drawn from the vastness of the universe, in comparison with the apparent insignificance of this globe, has sometimes shaken my reason for the faith that is in me; but my heart has always assured and reassured me that
Daniel Webster
#32. It was also Hegel who established the view that the different philosophic systems that we find in history are to be comprehended in terms of development and that they are generally one-sided because they owe their origins to a reaction against what has gone before.
Walter Kaufmann
#33. If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? He studies a single blade of grass.
Vincent Van Gogh
#34. The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.
William James
#35. There were no ashtrays and no sign of my philosophic cowpoke. I sensed he had been heading this way and most likely, spotting the spanking new paint job, just kept on going. I looked around. Nothing to hold me here, either, not even the dried carcass of a dead bee.
Patti Smith
#36. To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, surely, must be more beneficial to mankind.
Fanny Burney
#37. A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths.
Milan Kundera
#38. I mistrust the satisfaction which makes a display of the possession of Infinity; that is called fatuity in philosophic terms.
Edgar Quinet
#39. The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.
Theodore Dreiser
#40. There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead.
Bertrand Russell
#41. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects must be the result of philosophic consideration; what philosophy has to achieve in this respect is analogous to what the abolition of slavery achieved in affirming the worth of the individual human being.
Gilbert Simondon
#42. The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.
William Winwood Reade
#43. If freedom is to flourish the philosophic foundations of a free society must be kept a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of the liveliest minds.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#44. Modern Existentialism ... is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.
William Barrett
#45. Refuting the false promises requires philosophic understanding of economic interventionism, central banking, and the deeply flawed foreign policy of meddling in the affairs of other nations.
Ron Paul
#46. In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches.
Claude Bernard
#47. Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
#48. Modern Americans travel light, with little philosophic baggage other than a fervent belief in their right to the pursuit of happiness.
George Will
#49. The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life
the life of Goethe or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet isintense
the life of Blake or of Dante
taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music.
James Joyce
#50. We believe that the materials and the stories taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.
John Grierson
#51. a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.
G.K. Chesterton
#52. I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context.
John Dewey
#53. Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying no to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political.
Ignazio Silone
#54. The philosophic outlook rises above all sectarian controversy. It finds its own position not only by appreciating and synthesizing what is solidly based in the rival sects but also by capping them all with the keystone of nonduality.
Paul Brunton
#55. Paul Brunton's Notebooks are a veritable treasure-trove of philosophic-spiritual wisdom.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
#56. Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.
Alfred North Whitehead
#57. Both Brutus and Hamlet are highly intellectual by nature and reflective by habit. Both may even be called, in a popular sense, philosophic; Brutus may be called so in a stricter sense.
Andrew Coyle Bradley
#58. Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.
Ray Bradbury
#59. I needn't tell you that success and failure prove nothing - the whole thing is a lottery. It's pleasant to succeed; but for a philosophic mind it oughtn't to be very upsetting to fail.
George Sand
#60. Actually we do everything we can, whether it is in a philosophic sense or a practical sense, to put ourselves at the center of the universe.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#61. Men have such a good opinion of themselves, of their mental superiority and intellectual depth; they believe themselves so skilled in discerning the true from the false, the path of safety from those of error, that they should be forbidden as much as possible the perusal of philosophic writings.
Al-Ghazali
#62. I think that fiction and, as I say, history and biography are immensely important, not only for their own sake, because they provide a picture of life now and of life in the past, but also as vehicles for the expression of general philosophic ideas, religious ideas, social ideas.
Aldous Huxley
#63. Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.
Mel Brooks
#64. Monotheism owes its existence not to philosophic speculation about the nature of reality or knowledge or virtue, but to acceptance of reality identified with a supreme being.
Israel Shenker
#65. Systems, scientific or philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.
Alfred North Whitehead
#66. Philosophic questions are attempts to understand the root nature of reality, existence, and knowledge.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#67. Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#68. In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#69. Philosophic concepts are a form of sentiment. Conflicts between lofty ideas and vouchsafed values are endemic for any thinking person.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#70. A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United States was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia.
Mercy Otis Warren
#71. A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.
G.K. Chesterton
#72. Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculation or philosophic reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind.
Baruch Spinoza
#73. We really cannot see what equanimity there is in jerking a lacerated carp out of the water by the jaws, merely because it has no the power of making a noise; for we presume that the most philosophic of anglers would hardly delight in catching a shrieking fish.
Leigh Hunt
#74. We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.
Sigmund Freud
#75. That fact that Athens could condemn its noblest citizen to death did more than make a profound impression on him. It was to shape the course of his entire philosophic endeavor.
Jostein Gaarder
#77. So the nature required to make a really noble Guardian of our commonwealth will be swift and strong, spirited, and philosophic.
Plato
#78. The great experimental principle, then, is doubt, that philosophic doubt which leaves to the mind its freedom and initiative, and from which the virtues most valuable to investigators in physiology and medicine are derived.
Claude Bernard
#79. Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.
Thomas Carlyle
#80. 'Truth Will Set U Free' is about honesty. My philosophic belief that ultimately being true to yourself is liberating, with every individual's inalienable right to be who they are without fear or recrimination.
Corey Hart
#81. If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.
James Madison
#82. To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
Edward Gibbon
#83. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanized the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it.
E. M. Forster
#84. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#85. To say that science is the measure of all true knowledge is not a scientific truth but a philosophic claim about science. It's scientism posing as science.
Scott Klusendorf
#86. He was at the stage of a meal when one becomes philosophic.
Agatha Christie
#87. What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons ... we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless "Why?" and "What next?".
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#88. Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience.
Felix Adler
#89. Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum.
Jacques Maritain
#90. Clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting.
Erich Maria Remarque
#91. Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist - neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.
Leonard Peikoff
#92. To reach him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem of communication turns into a major philosophic inquiry.
Robert M. Pirsig
#94. Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.
William James
#95. The well taught philosophic mind To all compassion gives; Casts round the world an equal eye, And feels for all that lives.
Anna Letitia Barbauld
#96. on page 96 of my hero Peter Medawar's book The Limits of Science: 'I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God.
Richard Dawkins
#97. I know that there are many persons to whom it seems derogatory to link a body of philosophic ideas to the social life and cultureof their epoch. They seem to accept a dogma of immaculate conception of philosophical systems.
John Dewey
#98. Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.
Immanuel Kant
#99. When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?
George Santayana
#100. I have always been a friend to hero-worship; it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilized people - the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism - it is mere fetish ... There is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race.
George Henry Borrow
