Top 100 Quotes About Philosophy And History
#1. My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.
F. Sionil Jose
#2. I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast-but for luncheon-for dinner- for tea-for supper-for between meals.
Mark Twain
#3. 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
#7. I'm big into social studies, the humanities. I really love history and world issues and philosophy and law.
Connor Jessup
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.
Imre Lakatos
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
Tom Stoppard
#15. One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.
Will Durant
#16. 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
#17. There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#18. For the miserable find comfort in the philosophy that not on them alone has evil fallen.
Procopius
#19. 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
#21. But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all philosophy, all history - is lies.
Anne Rice
#22. 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
#23. Interestingly, when they are on our side, we usually refer to them as guerrillas or partisans or freedom fighters. When they, the men in the hills, oppose a government we support, we call them insurgents.
Dick Couch
#24. [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
#26. 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
#27. Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Carl Sagan
#28. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#29. Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.
Christopher Hill
#30. Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
#31. 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
#32. Winner goes with the flow, History Maker against the flow
Kjiva
#33. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.
Saul Bellow
#34. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
Margaret Thatcher
#41. 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
#42. The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.
William Barrett
#43. (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
#44. 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
#45. Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know.
Criss Jami
#46. 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
#48. Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion.
Andre Suares
#49. Precious laughing time is wasted, because I have to put up with Satan's stupid minions who smile without attempting to anger somebody else - leave us alone already.
A Gentlemen
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Everything is repeated, in a circle. History is a master because it teaches us that it doesn't exist. It's the permutations that matter.
Umberto Eco
#61. I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.
Baron De Montesquieu
#62. Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.
Adam Nevill
#63. If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!
Emmy Rossum
#65. A child who does not think about what happens around him and is content with living without wondering whether he lives honestly is like a man who lives from a scoundrel's work and is on the road to being a scoundrel.
Jose Marti
#66. With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
#67. I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.
William Shakespeare
#68. 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
#69. God is a geometrician.
Plato
#71. The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.
Bryan Magee
#72. The United States is the result of an enlightened philosophy; China is the outcome of traditions and history.
Patrick Mendis
#73. Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.
Margaret Thatcher
#74. 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
#75. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#76. The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
#77. Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity.
Jean Piaget
#78. The attempt to isolate economics from other disciplines-notably politics, history, philosophy, finance, constitutional theory and sociology-has fatally disabled its power to explain what is happening in the world.
Will Hutton
#79. The whole life of the philosopher is a preparation for death.
Plato
#81. 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
#83. 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
#85. What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.
Peter Singer
#87. 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
#88. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
#89. 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
#90. As far back as history records people thinking, thinking people
have been befuddled by the mysteries of life and existence.
Lewis N. Roe
#91. 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
#92. I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.
Tim Blake Nelson
#94. Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Karl Jaspers
#99. 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
#100. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race.
Victor Hugo
