Top 100 Quotes About The Philosophers
#1. We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
Steven Levy
#2. The 'absurdities' of life can either turn you into a 'philosopher' or a 'humorist'..
Both 'opposing' poles of the same scale, a matter of understanding..
Ideal, if we can slide down the scale this way and that...
Read somewhere..Philosophers get heard, Humorists get paid..
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#3. It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?
Isaac Asimov
#4. Religious life is about something real in human experience that is not constrained by what Wittgenstein called 'all that is the case'. In this sense Heidegger is not simply 'mistaken' - he just asks us, as philosophers mostly do, to think more carefully about what we're saying.
George Pattison
#5. Philosophers have said before that one of the fundamental requisites of science is that whenever you set up the same conditions, the same thing must happen. This is simply not true, it is not a fundamental condition of science.
Richard Feynman
#6. This plan looks like foolishness to earthbound philosophers. How can man comprehend a plan so based on love and servitude that his own deliverance and restoration is achieved by the death of the very "Lord of glory" (2:8)?
Albert H. Baylis
#7. Future generations may or may not judge Wittgenstein to be one of the great philosophers. Even if they do not, however, he is sure always to count as one of the great personalities of philosophy. From our perspective it is easy to mistake one for the other; which he is time will tell.
A.C. Grayling
#8. I had become aware, as early as my college days, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible can be imagined, that has not been held by one of the philosophers.
Rene Descartes
#9. And even though we have read all the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, we shall never become philosophers if we are unable to make a sound judgement on matters which come up for discussion; in this case what we would seem to have learnt would not be science but history.
Rene Descartes
#10. It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
Soren Kierkegaard
#11. Whoso has sixpence is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all men; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him,to the length of sixpence.
Thomas Carlyle
#12. Wonder is a verb. An activity, like walking or eating cheese. Despite what we may think we are all already philosophers; the question simply is whether we do it well or poorly.
Thomas Swanson
#13. And so I ask, "Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins?" But God, who is the oldest of the philosophers, answers in his weary cryptic way, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits.
Norman Mailer
#14. We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Epictetus
#15. To the Dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage
Plutarch
#16. That which Steinitz gave to the theoretical aspect of the game when he was at his best is very remote to all out home-bred chess philosophers, but with his views on Morphy, whom he tries to discredit completely, it is of course impossible to agree.
Alexander Alekhine
#17. In England, philosophers are honoured, respected; they rise to public offices, they are buried with the kings ... In France warrants are issued against them, they are persecuted, pelted with pastoral letters: Do we see that England is any the worse for it?
John Dewey
#18. But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.
George Pattison
#19. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.
Alan Lightman
#20. Of all the senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the demonstrations of these philosophers who undertake to tell us all about the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove that there is no God.
Thomas Huxley
#21. Philosophers can debate the meaning of life, but you need a Lord who can declare the meaning of life.
Max Lucado
#22. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#23. We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers ... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?
Richard Feynman
#24. [Stephenson] believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies.
Peter Steinhart
#25. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.
Aldous Huxley
#26. According to Democritus, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water of which serves as a mirror in which objects may be reflected. I have heard, however, that some philosophers, in seeking for truth, to pay homage to her, have seen their own image and adored it instead.
Charles Francis Richter
#27. The huge majority of philosophers seem to think that including impure properties in the range of the quantifiers of the principle would make the principle trivial. I have argued that it does not.
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
#28. Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.
Patricia Churchland
#29. Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
Cesare Pavese
#30. That's right!" agreed Majikthise. "You'll have a national Philosophers' strike on your hands!" The
Douglas Adams
#31. You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings.
Catherine The Great
#32. Otherwise, all I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking.
W.G. Sebald
#33. Life is a chaplet of little miseries which the philosopher counts with a smile. Be philosophers, as I am, gentlemen; sit down at the table and let us drink. Nothing makes the future look so bright as surveying it through a glass of chambertin.
Alexandre Dumas
#34. Hundreds of philosophies and scores of religions have been invented to circumvent the Word of God. Modern philosophers and psychologists are still trying to make it appear that there is some way out other than the path of Jesus.
Billy Graham
#35. Wherever a choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory - reason.
Aldous Huxley
#36. Those who have the largest hearts have the soundest understandings; and they are the truest philosophers who can forget themselves.
William Hazlitt
#37. The truth has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Graham Greene
#38. Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise - because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilized man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#39. The ancient Greeks, poets, authors and philosophers all puzzled over the question but nobody really knows what love is - including me. Longing for another person is an exciting mental experience.
Nicole Kidman
#40. take care, in reading the writings of philosophers or hearing their speeches, that you do not attend to words more than things, nor get attracted more by what is difficult and curious than by what is serviceable and solid and useful.
Plutarch
#41. There are two ways of extending life : firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another ... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#42. To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.
Brigid Brophy
#43. There is reason to think the most celebrated philosophers would have been bunglers at business; but the reason is because they despised it.
George Savile
#44. All philosophers must, therefore, doff their hats to the poets when they discover that the path of reason takes them only so far.
Hagiwara Sakutaro
#45. The venerable teachers, philosophers & spiritual practitioners throughout history have concluded that the greatest happiness we can experience comes from the development of an open, loving heart.
Allan Lokos
#46. Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.
Samuel Johnson
#47. The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
Herbert Read
#48. You will find that there is no other difference of opinion as regards any portions of the Universe, except that the philosophers believe in the Eternity of the Universe and we believe in the Creation. Note this.
Maimonides
#49. I believe in magic ... There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster.
Emanuel Lasker
#50. The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#51. Suppose cats became philosophers, they would see a cat universe and have a cat solution of the problem of the universe, and a cat ruling it. So we see from this that our explanation of the universe is not the whole of the solution.
Swami Vivekananda
#52. Since the princes take the Earth for their own, it's fair that the philosophers reserve the sky for themselves and rule there, but they should never permit the entry of others.
Bernard Le Bovier De Fontenelle
#53. What I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
Cornel West
#54. The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers are what novels are for women.
Voltaire
#55. I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.
Hippolyte Taine
#56. But, after all, the sciences have made progress, because philosophers have applied themselves with more attention to observe, and have communicated to their language that precision and accuracy which they have employed in their observations: In correcting their language they reason better.
Etienne Bonnot De Condillac
#57. The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.
Paul Lafargue
#58. Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil
Mark Twain
#59. Only when one thinks even much more madly than the philosophers can one solve their problems.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#60. Osho is one of India's greatest mystics ... I see him as one of the world's great teachers, thinkers, philosophers and guides of our times. I have enormous respect for his world vision and the kind of International Communities he is building. I have always felt his influence in my life.
Kabir Bedi
#61. Some are slaves of ambition or money, but others are interested in understanding life itself. These give themselves the name of philosophers , and they value the contemplation and discovery of nature beyond all other pursuits.
Pythagoras
#62. I started to investigate and unearth an old faith which for thousands of years we philosophers used to build on as the safest of all foundations - which we built on again and again although every previous structure fell in: I began to undermine our faith in morals . But ye do not understand me? -
Friedrich Nietzsche
#63. Philosophers are in the habit of setting themselves before life and experience.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#64. We don't learn anything there [school]. The difference between schoolteachers and philosophers us that school-teachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils
Jostein Gaarder
#65. Admirable man, who know teeth by dreams, think you that all those of philosophers are decayed?
Paul Valery
#66. The world's philosophers and theologians searched for answers to the same mysteries.
Robert Vaughn
#67. Philosophers and psychologists may argue over what's real and what isn't, but most of us living ordinary lives know and accept the texture of the world around us.
Stephen King
#68. A single human brain has about a hundred million nerve cells ... and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, nerve scientists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.
Tony Hoare
#69. I studied English at Princeton in the early eighties in what I consider a period of high obscurity. Professors and students ran around discussing the work of critics and philosophers that I doubt they'd read or understood.
Walter Kirn
#70. Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.
Leo Strauss
#71. What philosophers say about actuality [Virkelighed] is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale.
Soren Kierkegaard
#72. Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
#73. For us scientists, on the other wing, life is not quite so simple. Because we learn the unknown. Unlike, hah-hah, our esteemed friends the philosophers, who learn the unknowable.
Ken MacLeod
#74. Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.
Bertrand Russell
#75. philosophers of difference are, in fact, hyperethical and radical political thinkers, concerned with how movements that seek to address marginalization need to become even more ethical, even more radical in their desire to change the status quo in view of justice.
Matthew Calarco
#76. Now there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world.
Roma Tearne
#77. But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
Walter Bagehot
#78. Comedians are thinkers. The best ones are akin to philosophers, in my opinion.
Ted Alexandro
#79. The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?
James Nachtwey
#80. Over most of the one thousand years of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophy was assiduously studied in every generation by many ancient philosophers and their students as the best way to become good people and to live good human lives.
John M. Cooper
#81. I was occupied by a range of questions, often different from those fashionable in the professional philosophy of the past half century, that have sometimes troubled philosophers in the past. It's taken me several decades to work out my own philosophical agenda, and it is wide.
Philip Kitcher
#82. Philosophers and theologians have argued for centuries over the morality of targeted assassinations - a technique that the Israelis use with some frequency - without ever reaching anything approaching consensus.
Eric Alterman
#83. Most influential of all is the philosopher Stanley Cavell, and a younger generation of philosophers who have attempted to follow his pioneering work in thinking about literature philosophically.
Philip Kitcher
#84. God created man in His own image, says the Bible; philosophers reverse the process: they create God in theirs.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#85. I've been told by many the art of poetry's dead, I believe it's alive on pages they haven't read
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#86. Remember what one of our philosophers once said, 'In the human heart there is a perpetual generation of passions, such that the ruin of one is almost always the foundation of another.
Richard Castle
#87. It is a logical absurdity to equate democracy with freedom in the way that mainstream political philosophers and commentators typically do. A system where individuals and minorities are at the mercy of unconstrained majorities hardly constitutes freedom in any meaningful sense.
Keith Preston
#88. but that it is only the writings and precepts of the philosophers and other fine writers that are the true riches, because they enrich with virtue the minds of those that possess them." Euthydemus
Xenophon
#89. Only a philosopher would consider taking Oedipus as a model for a normal, unproblematic relation between an action and the maxim of the act.
Jerry A. Fodor
#90. Philosophers are people who do violence, but have no army at their disposal, and so subjugate the world by locking it into a system.
Robert Musil
#91. Disputes among natural philosophers are of use to science, as the quarrels of the great, and the clamors of the little, are necessary to freedom of thought and the advancement of learning.
Hal Hellman
#92. I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
William Harvey
#93. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
Richard Dawkins
#94. Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.
Albert Einstein
#96. All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.
Philip Yancey
#97. Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#98. Labor is the fabled magician's wand, the philosophers stone, and the cap of good fortune.
James Weldon Johnson
#99. Ninety percent of [contemporary philosophers] see their principle task as that of beating religion out of men's heads ... We are far from being able to provide scientific basis for the theological world view.
Kurt Godel
#100. Like true philosophers I've come to believe that religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown after proper education.
Josh Lanyon
