Quotes About Philosophy

The beliefs of atheists would have to require at least as much faith as those of religious believers. But they don't.

Atheism is not a faith position because it is belief in nothing beyond that which is supported by evidence and argument. Religious belief is a faith position because it goes beyond what there is evidence or argument for. That is why faith requires something 'special' that ordinary belief does not have.

The problem of induction is the problem of how an argument can be good reasoning as induction but be poor reasoning as a deduction.

if there were no theists, there wouldn't even be any atheists.

I don't believe in God, but I miss him.

Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

Schopenhauer's... vitriolic contempt for the 'professors of philosophy'. Independently wealthy, Schopenhauer scorned those who lived 'from' rather than 'for' philosophy: since he who pays the piper calls the tune, independence of thought, he held, requires independence of means.

A true world is a destination; a destination such that to reach it is to enter…a state of 'eternal bliss', a heaven, paradise, or utopia. Hence true world philosophies…give meaning to life by representing it as a journey; a journey towards 'redemption, towards an arrival that will more than make up for the stress and discomfort of the traveling.

Socrates believed that true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.

He was still thoughtful. 'Do you think any of us ever really knows anyone?' 'Philosophy, Lord Dryden? And yet it's daylight and everyone is still sober.

Out of sight, out of mind. My philosophy of life in a test tube.

Happiness is the absence of suffering. I think it's an interesting way of looking at it. I think the absence of suffering exists very rarely in the world we live in.

I can't buy the idea that we're supposed to live and learn from horrible things. That somehow these things happen so we can grow as people

Dean Philip Hinckler was prone to semi-sentences that expired, half-finished, in rhetorical cul-de-sacs.

That teaching according to which intellectual activity is worthy of esteem to the extent that it is practical and to that extent alone.

From his loftiest pulpit the modern clerc assures man that he is great in proportion as he is practical.

Philosophy, which formerly raised man to feel conscious of himself because he was a thinking being and to say, I think therefore I am, now raises him to say I think, therefore I am not, (unless he takes thought into consideration only in that humble region where it is confused with action).

The desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action...

And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died.

Man is a machine and… in the whole universe there is but a single substance variously modified.

For us life is a fact, no less, and, above all, no more.

Thought involves a little charlatanism.

I don't know whether there are numbers. And you?

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.