Quotes About Philosophy

There are four classes of Idols which beset men's minds. To these for distinction's sake I have assigned names, calling the first class Idols of the Tribe; the second, Idols of the Cave; the third, Idols of the Market Place; the fourth, Idols of the Theater.

But of one thing I am satisfied, that the reason for which a vacuum was introduced by Leucippus and Democritus (namely, that without it the same bodies could not embrace and fill sometimes larger and sometimes smaller spaces) is a false one. For matter is clearly capable of folding and unfolding itself in space, within certain limits, without the interposition of a vacuum; nor is there in air two thousand times as much of vacuity as there is in gold.

One of the fathers, in great severity, called poesy vinum doemonum, because it filleth the imagination; and yet, it is but with the shadow of a lie. But it is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt; such as we spake of before.

The longer one lives, the more mysterious life seems.

"You," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

We need, in other words, a better theory of the human soul.

But what if Rousseau was wrong and that inner self was, as traditional moralists believed, the seat of asocial or harmful impulses, indeed of evil?

modern thought has arrived at an impasse, unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes man and his specific dignity, and consequently unable to define the rights of man.

The young Hegel witnessed Napoleon riding through his university town after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and saw in that act the incipient universalization of recognition in the form of the principles of the French Revolution. This is the sense in which Hegel believed that history had come to an end: it culminated in the idea of universal recognition;

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

The prospect of future lives in remote heavens as a compensation for the inadequacy of our present lives is a bad tradeoff for losing out on the present.

That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.

All beliefs are bald ideas.

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

Another way of approaching the thing is to consider it unnamed, unnamable.

a discussion about the miraculous quickly devolves to an argument about whether or not one is willing to consider any possibility whatsoever of the supernatural

to apply scientific arguments to the question of God's existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error.

to apply scientific arguments to the question of God's existence, as if this were somehow a showstopper, is committing a category error

Faith and reason are not, as many seem to be arguing today, mutually exclusive. They never have been. The letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament defines faith as 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of the things not seen.

What, to use Noble Laureate Wigner's classic phrase, accounts for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'?

In passing, we should note this curious mark of our own age: the only absolute allowed is the absolute insistence that there is no absolute.

I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only the emotions I can prove. I'd be a unrecognizable oddity if I did.

The subject of free will is neither the intellect, nor the will, but both faculties conjointly.

Marx's work has often been dismissed as 'crude dogma', usually by people who give no evidence of having read him.