Quotes About Philosophy

As Plato said, all poets are liars. This does not mean we should mistrust them.

Franklin's idea for a multidenominational church where all who accepted "the existence of a supreme intelligence" could come together in celebration of common ideas of morality rather than fixed religious doctrines

The story of Thomas Day's quest to create a perfect wife symbolizes an eternal human desire: to craft a supreme being

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato . In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'.

The probability wave] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of potentia in Aristoelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.

It's a great metaphor. For what? I don't know to this day. But I know it's a great metaphor.

Today I often said 'forest' to myself. Truth itself wanders through the forests.

I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in. I didn't know anything about it, I didn't even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.

Paradox is a characteristic of truth.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

The knife of historical relativism... which has cut to pieces all metaphysics and religion must also bring about healing.

Demandez-vous s´il y a une explication au mystere de la vie et de la mort

There is nothing serious in mortality!

Many men, many opinions, as one of the ancients said, before my time.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt—particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.