Quotes About Philosophy

By religion I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual

Bad philosophers may have a certain influence; good philosophers, never

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize until you have tried to make it precise.

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.

To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress -- though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do.

Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.

This is patently absurd but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities.

And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Life wasn't always fair, she thought, but there it is. You took what was handed you and make the best of it.

Empty-brained triflers who have never tried to think, who take their creed as they take their fashions, speak of atheism as the outcome of foul life and vicious desires.

Not out of right practice comes right thinking, but out of right thinking comes right practice. It matters enormously what you think. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking.

It took all their common sense and philosophy to face life these days. The two are synonymous.

Whether you're explaining where pets go when they die or teaching your child to recycle, your philosophies have ramifications. For the rest of history, echos of your voice will be heard.

They say there's no such thing as a perfect pearl - that nothing from nature can ever be truly perfect.

I don't think it's spiritually economic to be a skeptic about absolutely everything.